So for the final time here is our plea, Kelly is running to raise money for the Cardiomyopathy Association. Cardiomyopathy, which literally means “heart muscle disease,” is the deterioration of the function of the myocardium (i.e., the actual heart muscle) for any reason. People with cardiomyopathy are often at risk of arrhythmia or sudden cardiac death or both.

Kelly has currently run 20 miles in training, and besides worrying about where the extra 6.5 miles is going to come from on the day, is all but ready to complete the run. We have in the past offered the opportunity to purchase t-shirt advertising on Kelly’s and all of our team’s (who will be there supporting Kelly) t-shirts, we are getting these printed on Saturday 17th April so you still have time to get your logo on her shirt if you wish.

All we are asking is that you sponsor Kelly Frew for her run, any amount you wish, and you claim your space. I’ll also chuck you a fair few links back from this blog as a way of saying thanks. T-shirt advertising and links! What more could you want?

If you are interested please sponsor Kelly here: http://www.justgiving.com/Kelly-Frew and then email me your logo and site details: paul@ozido.com

Again a huge thanks to everybody who has already sponsored Kelly, I’ll report back how the run goes afterwards.

It took 3 hours to get from Peterborough to Stonehenge, 4 hours to get back due to the M25 being chocker, and despite not being able to find any promotional codes and having to pay £6 to get in and visit the site (£6 to look at rocks ???) it was actually a great day out and I thoroughly recommend taking the time to go and visit if you haven’t already. I don’t really have any meaningful insights into the history of Stonehenge that isn’t available on their website (http://www.stonehenge.co.uk) so i’ll just jump straight to the pictures I took.

Kelly Frew – Sponsorship Update

In my last post I mentioned that one of our team Kelly Frew was looking for sponsors for her London Marathon run in return for Tshirt advertising. A big thanks to everybody who has donated so far and if you haven’t already, join the likes of Bras.co.uk and Newquay Hotels UK and claim your T-Shirt Advertising now! (Full Details Here)

So let me start by saying you can sponsor Kelly Frew here: http://www.justgiving.com/Kelly-Frew

Cardiomyopathy is a weakening of the heart muscle or a change in heart muscle structure. It is often associated with inadequate heart pumping or other heart function problems.  You can find out more here.

Kelly has to raise £1500 minimum to enter the marathon which is no easy feat, so we thought it was time to get creative. Firstly every company / website / individual who makes a donation will recieve a logo printed on Kelly’s running T-shirt, I’ll also be down in London along with the rest of our team who will be wearing the same logo’d up T-shirts, so it’s a nice bit of exposure.

Secondary, everyone who donates will be plugged in my next 10 posts giving a fair bit of exposure and a few good links, T-shirt advertising and links? What more can you ask for.

No minimum donation required, every penny will be going towards the Cardiomyopathy Association
so it really is a worthwhile cause.

Interested? Make your donation here: http://www.justgiving.com/Kelly-Frew and email me at paul@ozido.com and let me know you’ve done so, we’ll take it from there.

Thanks for reading     )

Sponsorship Update

We have our first sponsors who have claimed their space on Kelly’s running T-shirt, so a big thanks to the following:

George Marshall who runs the Bras website Bras.co.uk

Joe Conner who runs the Promotional Codes website cantbarsed.com

About a week ago I was under the impression that everywhere in the UK had suffered dramatic snow falls, or at least that’s what the news was telling me. So as you do when trains are at their worst I decided to pack up my stuff for the week and head down to Newquay to see what it had to offer in the winter months.

After looking over Newquay Hotels UK I booked my hotel and the above picture was taken from my hotel room window. As you’ll undoubtedly notice, not a single snow flake in sight. The Newquay winds had kept the snow away, but deceivingly so as all the villages and towns surrounding Newquay were covered in the white stuff meaning we were actually snowed in.

13 hours to get there, 11 hours to get back it was a long old journey but it was great fun.

Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until they’ve faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you’ll look back at photos of yourself and recall in a way you can’t grasp now how much possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You are not as fat as you imagine.

Don’t worry about the future. Or worry, but know that worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you at 4pm on some idle Tuesday.

Do one thing every day that scares you.

Sing.

Don’t be reckless with other people’s hearts. Don’t put up with people who are reckless with yours.

Floss.

Don’t waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you’re ahead, sometimes you’re behind. The race is long and, in the end, it’s only with yourself.

Remember compliments you receive. Forget the insults. If you succeed in doing this, tell me how.

Keep your old love letters. Throw away your old bank statements.

Stretch.

Don’t feel guilty if you don’t know what you want to do with your life. The most interesting people I know didn’t know at 22 what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most interesting 40-year-olds I know still don’t.

Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees. You’ll miss them when they’re gone.

Maybe you’ll marry, maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll have children, maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll divorce at 40,  maybe you’ll dance the funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary. Whatever you do, don’t congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either. Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else’s.

Enjoy your body. Use it every way you can. Don’t be afraid of it or of what other people think of it. It’s the greatest instrument you’ll ever own.

Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living room.

Read the directions, even if you don’t follow them.

Do not read beauty magazines. They will only make you feel ugly.

Get to know your parents. You never know when they’ll be gone for good. Be nice to your siblings. They’re your best link to your past and the people most likely to stick with you in the future.

Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people who knew you when you were young.

Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard. Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you soft. Travel.

Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise. Politicians will philander. You, too, will get old. And when you do, you’ll fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable, politicians were noble and children respected their elders.

Respect your elders.

Don’t expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you have a trust fund. Maybe you’ll have a wealthy spouse. But you never know when either one might run out.

Don’t mess too much with your hair or by the time you’re 40 it will look 85.

Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it’s worth.

Lets get this straight, the workers know exactly what they are doing by striking at this time of year. On the first day, mail centre staff and drivers will strike. The next day it will be delivery and collection staff meaning maximum disruption to service whilst each employee only loses one days pay. Whether these workers are right to strike or not isn’t for me to involve myself in, it’s how it has been dealt with by the leaders at Royal Mail that really frustrates me.

There are over 2.5 million unemployed people in the UK, a good majority of who would give an arm to get themselves back into employment, and we’re accepting these people walking out and striking over conditions THEIR union agreed to previously? If it were my business, anybody who walked out would be out on their ear with the option to reapply for thier jobs along with the rest of the unemployed people.

Sadly it isn’t as simple as that as the Royal Mail is owned by the government, a government who are badly struggling to stay in power come the next election and to take such a stance would probably mean the little hope they have left of staying in power would be out of the window, a sign we should privatise the Royal Mail maybe?

But what have the Royal Mail actually done to resolve the strikes? 40 days of solid chat with the union hasn’t resolved the issue so are they expecting another 40 days of chat will? The time for chat is never over, but you need to also take action. Bringing in unskilled tempory staff (which would have come in for Christmas anyway) has done little to stop the millions of letters / parcels stacking up in the extra warehouses they’ve hired to do little more than store them in.

When a business has such a monopoly on a sector (in this case mail delivery) like the Royal mail has, it has to do something pretty dumb to lose that overnight, something the Royal Mail are going to educate the world as to how to achieve at this rate. Whilst the Internet, particularly email, has been blamed for the problems facing the Royal Mail in recent years, it’s actually the Internet and the emergence of Ecommerce which has kept it going with such strengths, but maybe the royal Mail haven’t understood this and adapted?

The strikes have meant that retailers just won’t send their parcels through Royal Mail with the likes of Amazon, John Lewis, Tesco and a mass of other major retailers have simply switched to alterior courier companies, many of whom are cheaper to send with then the Royal Mail.

Here’s how I’d have handled it, rightly or wrongly…. I’d have simply stopped all services to EVERYONE other than my business customers. No pick ups from post boxes, no non business services at post offices, nothing.

I’d have visited my top 1000 customers and guaranteed them that their mail will be delivered without delay as usual, communicating to the rest of businesses that services will be as normal for them. Why? Simply because now that John Lewis, Amazon and everyone has left, who’s to guarantee that they are going to come back when there are cheaper services with the same convenience available to business customers? So if the Royal Mail only serviced it’s business customers, mail would be at a manageable level, I’d have just about the right number of experienced staff to keep it ticking over and we wouldn’t have these warehouses dotted around the country full of undelivered mail from a week ago.

As a consumer I’d rather Royal Mail had taken this action. At the moment I can send something, but never know if or when its going to get there, I’d rather than just stop accepting mail, that way I know where I stand.

Me, you and anybody who wants to send a postcard or a birthday card are going to be pretty annoyed by not being able to send it through Royal Mail, but other than a handful of people who will take it to heart and never use the Royal Mail again, we would return to them once the strike action was resolved simply because it’s convenient. Throwing a letter in a postbox is the everyday, it’s cheaper than alternative deliverers and we would return to doing it straight afterwards because of this, the alternatives just aren’t as convenient.

The only way a successor to the petrol car is ever going to work, is when it can be fuelled just like a petrol car, or as conveniently…

There would also be a massive pressure then on the staff at the Royal Mail who are striking because their friends, family, associates wouldn’t be able to use a service their working for…. because of their strike action. It would completely turn the tables on the strikers because the royal Mail would have a manageable workload.

No I wouldn’t be popular, but i’d be running a profitable service and I’d be being honest with all of my customers by saying “sorry guys, but whilst these strikes are going on we just can’t take your mail”, honesty goes a long way you know.

Quite simply your supposed to use remote viewing to be able to see the image and not the subliminal suggestions he’s probably been plugging throughout his programme.

The biggest percentage of guesses from people who guessed at the museum and in the audiance on the night was a set of concentric circles 9imagine an archery target) with over a third of each giving the same drawing. Interestingly quite a lot of people also drew Stonehenge, which about 10% of people drew, so not a bad set of averages.

In light of his recent efforts this is actually quite impressive, until you hear his theory….

His last sentence was that he had actually filmed the recording a week ago and knew a week in advance the result so he had a week to try and get us all to draw concentric circles. He did this by placing an ad in every major newspaper  today telling us to do so.

Well I have toady’s newspaper, The Daily Mirror and I’m looking on page 10 (which they told us it would be on) and the closest I’m seeing to concentric circles is a tyre advert. Or did i get the page wrong?

As always I’ll dig out the videos and post them as and when I come across them, but the solution for why everyone at home will have got close is a lot clearer than any of the newspaper rubbish.

Derren showed us last week how he can get people in a building to do something with subliminal messages being placed around (with his giraffe trick at Hamleys), so how about the people at home?

Notice how the cameras focused on her eyes, with her pupils dilated due to the bright light that was being shone into her face?

Concentric circles … eyes ….   (*sigh*)  NEXT!

Did you get the image right?

Success rate was apparently 50% in the studio, but despite me following the instructions and doing everything as asked, it didn’t work for me.

Did you watch it? And did Derren Brown stick you to your sofa?

I’d be interested in hearing from anyone who genuinely got stuck and their experience.

Derren Brown’s Studio Audience Stuck

Derren Brown Makes Girl Choose Giraffe Toy From millions Of Choices At Hamleys In Tonights “How To Control The Nation”.

This Guy Believes He Is Stuck To His Seat

And Another Stuck…

(i’ll add more video’s from tonights show as I find them).

He’s opened the show and quickly talked about how he was fascinated reading about all the solutions people had come up with, lasers, mirrors, split screens, everything we discussed previously. By mentioning them out right he appears to have dismissed them out of hand.

His emphasis for the show seems to be “how to predict a machines random numbers”, starting off by demonstrating he could understand how he could predict a humans behaviour by getting a girl on stage who didn’t like mice. He had four boxes on stage covered up and told the girl one of them contained a mouse. She had to put her hand into 3 of the boxes and she didn’t find the mouse. Infact there was no mouse, but derren had put a picture of a mouse on a card in front of the box and we were told he needed her to fear the mouse in order for him to ensure it worked.

Next we had 20 paper cups and the guy was told there was a pointy knife under one of them, would he stomp down on 14 of the paper cups for £500,000 if he happened to hit the knife. Again there was no knife underneath the cups, but a mouse under one, which of course he didn’t hit.

Then he worked on a group average theme, if a large group of people studied the previous lottery numbers and then made their predictions, Add the numbers up and divide by the number of people who made the prediction in the hope that a group would offer a better average. The best they managed was 3, well done to them they won a tenner!

He then said “the greed” was maybe getting in the way and stopped them from doing the maths to see if they’d won until after the lottery. Along with some kind of spirit writing (which supposedly lets your inner conscience take control), they then managed to get four of the numbers right, and were very close with the other two.

This put them at the last show which was broadcast live, where they managed to get all the lottery numbers correct and we saw them rejoicing on screen that they’d done it.

I’m going to go get a cider, then I’ll post part 3, why all of this is a complete load of fly infested rubbish….

It’s a pretty impressive feat? I’m not so sure. Obviously Derren doesn’t posses psychic powers and he will be the first person to admit this. Derren has said that he will reveal how he performed the “trick” on Friday at 9pm on channel 4, but if you engage a few of the braincells it doesn’t seem too difficult to figure out IMO.

What I didn’t like about the “trick” was that the prediction was made after the balls were revealed. Well yes, it’s not too difficult to predict something after they’ve already been revealed now is it. This effect would have been 100000000% better had Derren said these are going to be the numbers…. before they were drawn. The excuse that “legally the BBC / national lottery has the right to be the first to reveal the numbers” doesn’t stand up in my eyes. This coming from the man who set up an entire show in a supposedly secret location in order to broadcast a game of Russian roulette live…. since when has there been a law that says somebody can’t say “I think today’s national lottery numbers will be….”.

No audience. OK, if Derren can’t broadcast the numbers prior to them being drawn, why not fill that building with 10,000 people and predict to them beforehand what the numbers will be and record it, this could have then be played back afterwards with 10,000 witnesses that he got it correct. The excuse “we’re doing this alone so nobody can benefit” again doesn’t stand up. You cannot buy a national lottery ticket after 7.30pm is my understanding. That gives plenty of time to do the prediction and there’s no way his live audience would have been able to benefit.

Why if your going to predict the lottery numbers wouldn’t you buy a ticket? Camelot banned you? Are you seriously telling me Mystic Meg is banned from playing the lottery? No, shes not. Derren could have simply donated any winnings to charity or distributed his share himself to any other winners that day, which would have been acceptable.

So i’m not overly impressed, but regardless of this, lets look at how he may have achieved the effect:

The speculated solution is that there is a delay between the BBC1 show and the channel 4 show, meaning there’s plenty of time to temper with the balls, there is a lot of speculation amongst the Internet forums that every live screening has to have a 20 second delay at least in order to edit out any major happenings (like death). This however can easily be proven wrong by comparing the screenings of the two shows in a split screen as seen below. if there’s any delay, it’s less than a second.

If we look at it logically, from the moment the balls are revealed on the screen to the moment Derren reveals his predictions, there is exactly 30 seconds, in which time all you have to figure out is how he printed the numbers on the balls.

Anyone ever seen one of them stands before? Have one in your home? The biggest mistake magicians make IMO is to use “props” that just arn’t familiar to the world. We all know there’s something dodgy about them, that see through column holding the stand up could have contained a mirror, hiding the balls being shot up into hollow shells that were displayd at the top. Take a close look at the balls, there’s a nice groove in each of them which is unnatural.

The print could have been achieved using light based paints / lasers, this seems to be the general consensus of the discussion forums, that stand could have held any sort of technology.

The most obvious solution is camera trickery, freezing half the screen, demonstrated in the following video:

Derren will on Friday more then likely tell us that he’s studied the lottery numbers that have been drawn since it began and has found the most likely outcome of numbers based on more than 10 years data and now he’ll know them every week from here on in …. yep, sure you did.

But this isn’t a completely negative post, because Derren did indeed produce some magic on channel 4. Derren took over channel 4, more 4, e4, film 4 and any other of 4′s channels as well as all the +1 coverage for 10 minutes.

Derren ran a number of ads for over 2 weeks prior to the show again across all channels.

His PR machine went into overdrive with nearly all major newspapers / TV magazines /news websites covering the show before and after last nights performance.

Derren’s blog was inaccessible for hours after the show last night, something his technical team will have to learn from but demonstrating the popularity of the show. A quick search shows that the discussion forums have gone into overdrive debating how he performed the effect.

Quite simply the brand marketing / PR coverage that Derren has achieved is undoubtedly magic, and a lot of brands could learn from this, buzz marketing at its best.