Mary to Many

Ow, ow, ow

Sat, 10 May 2008 21:23:27 GMT

Sometime between sleeping badly, getting up early, taking photographs of the Eee 900, packing it up, taking to the post office and buying a bacon roll, I did something horrible to my back. Horrible enough Simon had to drive me home, help me out of the car, prop me up with pillows, feed me ibuprofen and finally diazepam and then find me an osteopath who was A open and B would stay late and see me. Thank you Cedric of Fulham Osteopaths!

This isn't the usual one leg longer than the other sacro-iliac pain; your SI is fine, said Cedric. So where is the agonising, I can't stand up, I can't walk, I can't sit down pain coming from, please? And did I say I fly to Florida on Monday? Maybe it's your LS. Of course in this much pain, he couldn't do all the tests and manipulations he wanted, so he put some movement through it, did some craniosacral work - and then the same gentle technique right on my aching sacrum, reminded me to use ice a lot and told me to relax. I find it hard to relax I said, twitching as he was doing the craniosacral; I've noticed, he said drily.

Cranio-sacral always makes me feel fragile and emotional. Something about the cradling, maybe, or just stopping. Today amongst other things, it made me think I'm not polite to the universe at the moment, because I don't trust it not to throw something horrid at me. I could do with stopping and relaxing, but for it to really work, I have to believe the universe won't throw a death in the family/wretched illness of someone I love/tax audit/house falling down/other Horrid Thing at me. On the other hand, if I stay this tense, I end up with Horrid Backache.

I also remembered we have cheapie toning pad machines that do something very like TENS, that I've found good for muscle pain in the past, and my regular osteo uses ultrasound and TENS style machines to good effect. So I'm wired up and being electrically pummelled. I wonder if I can take it on the plane?

Does the 60 second rule apply

Wed, 07 May 2008 11:22:37 GMT

To insects that you backhand out of the window because the buzzing near your head is irritating?

Between incompetent couriers, people with little grasp of timezones and accounts, I could do with a crumb of amusement today.

It's long life; it's not ruddy eternal

Fri, 02 May 2008 19:05:27 GMT

Ah, Citizen Smith; Robert Lindsay's finest hours. I wonder if they've stood the test of time?

Folks who know me, know that I regard sell-by dates as a suggestion. M&S were horrified when my mum once congratulated them on selling a yoghurt that was still good two years after the sell-by date (glad you enjoyed it, but please don't do that!). The man who opened the tins in his wedding hamper on his gold wedding anniversary? Why not - canning is a preservation method. Lea and Perrins being told to put a six month date on the bottles when they have a bottle dating from the opening of the factory that's still going strong? A bureaucrat who doesn't understand salt as a preservative.

Sugar works quite well too. My mum used to buy jam at village fêtes and sometimes pass them on a year or so later. I eat jam in batches, as it were; I'll want jam every day for a week or every week for a month and then not again for six months. I don't keep jam in the fridge once opened (definition of preserve, anyone - although modern homes don't have proper larders at the proper temperature so I sometimes compromise). That means there are a few elderly unopened jars in the cupboard; they crystallise at the top but are usually perfectly fine under the top crunchy inch. I opened one for my PBJ and I can report that while it is indeed preserved, after 15 years gooseberry jam is really more like candied gooseberries in jelly. A little crunchy, but rather nice...

Advertising is content too - and Google is no longer nimble

Fri, 02 May 2008 16:40:35 GMT

One of the reasons why I resigned from AOL to go freelance was the trend away from producing and commissioning our own editorial content and towards placing ads around partner content; it became a bizdev and production job rather than an editorial one, and that's not what I really do. AOL UK had an editorial director at the time, Andy Bull, whose management style I found a little abrasive. He left abruptly after giving an interview to the Media Guardian in which he said rather too frankly that he wasn't a fan of Harry Potter; as this was just before the first movie came out, in which Time Warner had invested $BIGNUM, that might have been the reason. I don't think it was because of the comment I personally disliked, that "advertising is content too"*.

The holy grail of online advertising is contextual ads that speak to your needs as an individual, at the time you're most ready to buy. Getting an offer for cut-price flights when I'm ready to book my ticket home from Orlando should be a win for both of us. But the baby steps along that road tend to be annoying (Gmail gets like Clippy: "I see you're breaking up with your girlfriend - would you like help with relationship counselling?"). And AOL had no contextual information about the user; they put wedding-related ads in the Wedding area and PC ads in the technology channel - it was just themed advertising.

Google can probably do a little better because it can mine your searches and your history and your email and all that information you publish about yourself in those memes you do. And you should get used to advertising 24x7 everywhere you look online courtesy of Google, and be thankful. Because Eric Schmidt is reminding me of that content comment. As he said to an interviewer from CNBC at the Milken Conference: "Google believes that advertising itself has value. The ads literally are valuable to consumers. Not just to the advertisers, but the consumers."

He goes on to admit that yes, they've already made the classic AOL blunder about monetising social networks. AOL made very little money from the most popular areas of the service: chat. You see, when you're talking to your friends, you don't interrupt the conversation to take a sales cold call, you don't click through to an advert. Social networks are the same; you care that your friend has a new car; you don't necessarily want to go look at the slick video of how a professional driver made it look good on TV, still less see a deal to buy one yourself. Who's buying all those ads on Facebook applications? Other Facebook application developers.

Other Schmidt nuggets
On not buying back stock: We love watching that cash sit in a well-managed bank and not get lost.
The new consumerism: Everybody wants the same thing. They want fashion, they want information, they want products, they want e-commerce, they want it now.
On discovering that running a big company means having a Microsoft-style formal process rather than spontaneous startup energy, even when you're a small fraction of Microsoft's size: [the biggest challenge today is] the ability to manage the creative process, deal with the complexity in what is a relatively large company, in terms of people, who's doing what. We have 50 development centers all around the world, people in different time zones, `Are you doing that? Are you doing that? Do I work with you? How do I check in my code?'...The systems in the company, literally who's doing what, what are they doing, seemed to lag our ability to hire these great people.

I did wonder if even after all this time it would be unprofessional to mention why I left AOL or to discuss the public record of someone I worked with; on consideration I thought it would only be unprofessional to snark about it*. I think ethics in journalism matter. That's why I thought this comment in the CNBC interview at a conference last week was pretty low.
CNBC's Maria Bartiromo: Yeah, you can bet, I guess, who tipped off the DOJ about the phone call that was made, Steve Ballmer or somebody from that side."
Not only it is a very soft-pedal interview, that refrains from asking any difficult questions (like if the Google tenet is do no evil, are they doing the right thing in China, if the Google tenet is don't trap user data, why are they complaining about being told 18 months is too long to keep it for?), but an unsubstantiated presumption about Microsoft behaving badly shouldn't go out at all, let alone be given authority because it's said by a journalist.

*I don't think I'm snarking by saying that Bull's departure from AOL was also three years before his prosecution as part of Operation Ore so probably not connected to the actions that led to his conviction and jail sentence (and for clarity, he's not the Guardian sports writer Andy Bull), which you can read his take on; that doesn't mention his time at AOL, which was during those four years, and it doesn't say whether he was paid for writing that article. I'm processing my own reaction to finding out that he was one of the few people caught by Ore who hadn't had their credit cards stolen but was looking at dubious content. I find it a little disquieting, but I'm far more offended by his suggestion that ISPs and search engines share his guilt by not have censored the sites or otherwise taken over the responsibility for his actions he should have taken himself.

Some other timezone

Fri, 02 May 2008 13:15:10 GMT

Finding the shift from sun to rain, from west coast to UK time, from conferences to tax time, really hard to make. Urk.

I never thought they had good sunsets in California

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 06:58:56 GMT

But the glorious sky over Moss Landing tonight is up there in my top ten unrolled carpets of fire and light.

We ummed and ahhed about whether to go to Nepenthe for lunch or Mountain View to sell books and decided to check the UPS store instead (they've moved, but we had no post waiting, which is unheard of the way banks here spam out statements). As it was such a lovely sunny day we thought 'ice cream' and drove over 17 to Capitola. The queue at Cafe Violetta was out the door and there were no tables free and as the first order of business was to check in online and score better seats we went to the coffee shop next door. I'd like to thank whoever runs the free wi-fi in Santa Cruz: it was nice and fast and got us aisle and window seats - a real amenity. We took our ice cream onto the beach - peach and honey and mexican chocolate and ollalaberry and honey and some cheesecake flavour - and perched on rocks and basked and window shopped all the way back without spending any extra money!

I needed a restroom and fancied more sea views so we tootled up and down every coastal side street to Aptos beach, where the house on the beach that looks like a boat has gained a dinghy and a ship's bell and a skirt-up Marilyn on the roof. No drummers but many people lighting fire pits and more sun.

Down the coast to Moss Landing. The yacht basin had three sea otters; one who vonted to be alone, one who wanted not to be disturbed by the fishing otter but would spin around with its paws up to its mouth in an overdose of cute, and the fishing otter who was turning somersaults, diving into the weed and coming up with mussels (and with weed all over its head) and banging them on a rock on its belly, with much noise, splashing and smacking of lips. Fishing otter had found such a good rock that it held onto said rock with both front flippers when diving or turning over in the water. Wonderful to watch.

We headed onto the beach before dinner and took photos of the surf (the surfers agreed with me about the best waves so my moody breaker shots keep having surfer heads in them). The Fuji camera Simon used to use takes good photos but I find it a little slow; I really do want that high-speed Casio I think, for times when I want to use a big camera (which is when we go somewhere specifically to take photos). We had a vast amount of fabulous fish things and now it's our last night - time only for packing, brunch, last minute work and a final attempt to find a battery-powered motion-sensitive LED light without buying one from Skymall...

I think I'm in love with Live Mesh

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 21:00:38 GMT

While himself is writing away (write like the wind! so we can go out in the sun!), I decided to set up Live Mesh. I'd followed the link they handed out at Web 2.0 but I knew from the Mesh team that those invites had all been used up (my guess: Microsoft provisioned for all the folk at the show but it wasn't a hard URL to guess even if you didn't find it in a blog). My signup was pending, but once you're in you can invite people and they get to join the Mesh straight away, so Simon invited me and shared his writing folder.

He sent it to the Live ID I use for my main email address, which for reasons of complexity is set to US locale and for reasons of me being a bear of little brain I can't remember the password for. I don't normally need to remember it because I have it linked to the Live ID I use all the time, which is my Hotmail address. After a couple of guesses I thought, 'let's see how smart Mesh is' and signed in with the main Live ID instead. Mesh accepted it. I could install the software (tiny) and see Simon's folder - but not his devices, so good separation. I added a folder that I don't have set up with SyncToy to replicate back to the server because the path isn't straightforward and as it has conference presentations it's useful for Simon on the road. But I didn't want to share it back to his Gmail account because I couldn't remember the email. He was in the process of linking his Live ID 's so I invited his main email account. And when he accepted the invitation while he was logged in with his other Live ID (still with me at the back?), it worked - all the linked Live ID 's have access to the Mesh they're supposed to have access to.

Now we have folders we can see and choose to sync from each other's machines. They sync quickly - and with placeholders for any files that haven't synced yet. Files are replicated into the cloud (up to 5GB) but if there's a direct path from my PC to Simon's the connection goes that way for speed and you can sync files over 5GB to another Mesh endpoint as long as it has the disk space.

If I don't want to sync the files to my PC because I don't need to have them, I just need to have access to them - I can see them online, through the Live Desktop - a browser window that shows me files and folders. I can open a file onto my PC or save it onto my PC or upload a file myself. This is the most idiot-proof syncing and sharing system I've ever seen and I speak as a bona fide idiot before my first cup of coffee.

I can think of so many ways to use this - and this is just the demonstration app. What matters is that underlying synchronisation layer. I want Flickr to be a Mesh endpoint so I never explicitly use an uploader again; I just mark a folder for sync and every image with a 5-star rating goes up (or maybe every image goes up but the rated ones go in a set). I want this to sync OneNote notes to my phone (Windows Mobile and Nokia clients are on the way). I'd quite like it as a way of doing posts from my mobile to LiveJournal - it would leave me an archive that could also be synced to the Semagic archive folder for local backup. It will mean that when Simon downloads videos he doesn't have to move them onto the NAS by hand. A universal list of the widgets I like and what basic settings I want them to have for every new widget platform to snarf up instead of me saying 'Weather: London, San Jose, Seattle, Christchurch' by hand every time.

Yep. There may be heartbreak and throwing of china in my future (What do you mean you don't like mapped drives? Mapped drives are very important to me!) but for now, Live Mesh is my new shiny.

Hey - I like it enough not to save all this until I get paid to write about it!

They're driving an animated sign around San Jose

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 03:40:13 GMT

On the back of a truck... we're all conferenced out and after a week of conference food we're ready for a treat so we're off to Original Joes. We had planned to have lunch with a friend in Napa tomorrow but he has to work, so we're at a loose end until we fly on Sunday...

Rain and redwoods

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 23:02:14 GMT

It was sunny when we went over to the Glass Beach at Fort Bragg; once the town dump, now the problem is stopping people taking away the pretty driftglass that keeps washing up, though I'm sure some folks add to the raw materials too. Lovely surf to watch and rocks to scramble over and a bold seagull inspired by Bodega Bay. Still sunny as we walked for a while in Van Damm state park, by the Little River under the redwoods. It clouded over a little as we drove past the lighthouse with the 1908 original Fresnel lens that sent the light from a kerosene map 14 miles out to sea, though we didn't notice when we were watching the glassmaker at Glass Fire and drooling over jelly fish lamp shades and buying a necklace of glass hearts and buying blackberry ice cream for lunch at Cow Licks.

We ate the ice cream gazing out to sea and seeing surf and seals but no whales. We stopped at another overlook for a last glimpse of sea before the 1 turned inland and twisted up and down over the hills. We stopped at a redwood grove labelled up by a 'responsible' forestry company and I couldn't resist snarking it. This is a tree that fell over; you can't blame us. This one caught fire; not us! This was the wind; don't blame us! This one is just old. This isn't even a redwood. Not our fault! Er, yeah, we cut this one down - but hey, look, squirrel! The honey bucket was also perched inside a rusty digger on caterpillar tracks in a scary post-industrial woodland fantasy way...

We also drove through a drive-through tree - just like the one in the Look and Learn book I had as a kid; I can still see the illustration in my head, with the car and the 50s clothes and the sense of being on holiday in a world becoming tomorrow. Rather special to do it, even though driving through a tree is kind of cheesy.

We drove up and down the 101 and the Avenue of the Giants as the rain started; so many twee redwood attractions - the one-log houses, the treehouses, the burl carvings, the Hobbiton US with the scary Gandalf-alike and hobbit houses sunk into the hillside (the talking book guide was unplugged and the orcs were shrouded in plastic so we avoided the wrath of Smaug... Spent the night at the Best Western in Fortuna where the jet in the hot tub is the most powerful I've ever sat down on by accident, had dinner at a diner where the waitress's conversation with the customers in the next booth was so easy to rewrite as porn dialog even though it was totally innocent. Coffee from Schotz in the morning, which has a fabulous Charles Rennie Macintosh logo then back through the redwoods which are awesome even in slightly grey skies. Stopped for a wine tasting at Riverbed Cellars in Malder Flat, where 80% of the town is vines and lunch in the Cafe of the Avenue, Miranda, which has a labelled fish tank with living coral. The Eel river is full of lampreys and a gorgeous blue-green between gravel banks.The things that look like bears drinking are really cows. We did another drive-through tree, and a drive-on tree - it's a log, we tarmac'ed it! - and walked into the Chimney Tree - big enough to pour a floor in - and looked at the weather rock at the visitor centre and had a generally fun time.

And as we needed to head back to SF, we booked Ad Hoc for dinner and drove to Napa and found the next Best Western, which was friendly and full of roses fresh picked form the garden and does an excellent breakfast, although we hardly needed it after dinner. Which was a green bean salad with walnuts and fingerling potatoes and air-dried ham and sliced radishes, buttermilk fried chicken with honey glazed biscuits and macaroni and cheese and spinach wilted with shallots, promontory cheese with marcona almonds and strawberry preserve and chocolate brownie with caramel sauce and vanilla cream. We had glasses of TuTu Pinot Gris and a local pinot gris beginning with H, possibly H for honey as it was deliciously rich.

Birthday dinner, birthday sleep, workday breakfast and drive to SF and off to the conference...

Having a lovely birthday

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 03:49:32 GMT

Thank you all for your kind wishes ;) We're off to dinner at Thomas Keller's Ad Hoc in Yountville; buttermilk chicken! Why yes, it was a spur of the moment decision...

It ain't heavy, it's the Mini-Note

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 08:02:46 GMT

The only thing to be disappointed about in the Mini-Note is the processor. The Via C7-M isn't a powerhouse. But on a system this size, how much performance are you going to need? Short of free, it's always easy to say the price is a little high but compare it to the OQO with the same processor to see how quickly the price for a really portable machine is going down. And if you want to know exactly why I like the keyboard so much, see my preview over at Tom's Hardware...

Wind, baaaby animals, wind, beer

Sun, 20 Apr 2008 16:43:19 GMT

Cafe la Press is nearer Chinatown than Union Square and it's a spot of Europe in the city, with dark wood and magazines and bowls of coffee. Spinach feta omelette is very Californian though. Got to play with the new portable Slacker Internet radio; prrof of concept rather than desirable finished device, but as I;ve been preferring the serendipity of radio to the tyranny of iPod choice this trip, and I used to love Echo Bay, this could be big. Plus the Devicescape integration gives it the most seamless Internet connection ever (beating out every hotel I've ever stayed in).

Out along Van Ness, admiring the Moorish theatre and the carved designs in a store I never remember to stop at and the murals on the WaMu and the flag sale and the Bill Bragg plumber's van (insert working man music joke here); over the Golden Gate in the fog and instead of turning into wine country we picked up the 1 (with a slight diversion because the junction is much too simple if you just do it right...). We wanted to photograph the pink plant creeping over the hills to see if it was heater; turning to find a good place we found Muir Beach overlook instead, where you can look down to the waves or back to San Francisco and feel sorry for the guys in the lookouts triangulating ships for the big guns. Masses of flowers on the hillside and what at the time we thought was a stiff wind. Hah!

I still had work to do so we stopped at Stinson Beach and I sat in the beach hut that's the Surfer's Grill on holidays and weekend to finish writing; very pleasant to do it with a view of the Pacific through sand dunes, though the warning that you can be eaten by a Great White in six feet of water kept my at the keyboard. For the rest of the afternoon, you can picture my laptop and mobile phone attempting to talk to that thar Interwebs to submit copy... Meanwhile, we were driving up highway 1 to Point Reyes. It's a lovely drive past ranches M through A, full of cows and fine-feathered chickens and lazy cats, with the sea hoving into view at the side. As you go through Inverness the houses are on the end of piers, and one is an arabian fantasy in wood with six cupolas. The lighthouse itself was shut and as we nearly got blown right off the cliff while taking photos of a white deer, I'm not sure I'd want to be any further off the ground. The wind is as loud as city traffic and the sea is whipped white in long rolling surf. Back along the peninsula and along the edge of a long mudflat estuary where seals and baby seals bask in the sun. Very green hills and woods compared to south of San Francisco, and then along the sea coast and finally into the hills.

Point Reyes town looks charming and expensive and where they hide the accommodation we do not know. Book ahead, I think. We didn't spot anywhere that looked worth stopping at short of Bodega Bay, where we passed several possibilities and picked the Inn at the Tides because we liked the sign for the Tides, the restaurant across the street. Turned out to be a mix of charming inn - lovely pool and spa pool, terraces on each room, cheese, wine and fruit in the rooms, Ggrich Hills winemakers dinner in the restaurant and some very friendly folks who joined us in the hot tub and shared a couple of bottles of wine with us (the Napa Cellers was delicious) - and high-class motel - beige tiled bathroom, particularly. The Tides - and Bodega Bay generally - is where The Birds was filmed so we eyed eyed all seagulls with suspicion. The Tides has its own dock for fishing boats and steams crabs in huge six-foot square cages in the season, but I went happy as a clam, following clam chowder with linguine alla vongole and stealing a taste of Simon's halibut. It's less authentic but a lot easier when most of the clams have been wrenched from the shell in advance, leaving me only three shells for show.

This morning we stopped for pictures at the Arch Rock and Shell Beach and for coffee at the Roadhouse and had our hats blown off, so we admired the rest of the coast and the breakers from the road until we got to Blind Beach, just short of Goat Rock. Even the seagulls were being blown sideways and we sheltered behind rocks to get photos. As you come down the steep slope into the car park there's some beautiful green exposed rock that could be a jade or turquoise. As you go back up the steep slope and cross the Russian River into Jenner, there's a restaurant called River's End (www.ilovesunsets.com) perched by the lagoon where you can eat rock shrinp with penne and feta and mushroom and concentrated tomato, and pick fried leeks off Simon's burger and watch the seals and the kayakers being towed out to look at the seals - and go outside and get blown away again.

We swooped around the curves of the road and bought smoked salmon and stopped to look out at the sea and get blown away half-way up the Jenner Grade. And then we walked off lunch by walking around Fort Ross, where the Russians did their best to claim California by oppressing the Aleuts and building 7 and 8-sided redwood blockhouses overlooking beautiful coves and selling metalwork to the Californians for grain. The stockade blocks a lot of the wind and the plants are swarming over the millstones. We felt a little like polite time travellers because a group of Russians in historical costumes were baking bread over an open fire and telling stories in the armoury and ringing the bell outside the chapel and straightening their waistcoats in front of the mirrors and taking kasha out of Whole Foods bags...

At this point I nearly fell asleep in the car, despite lovely curving and swooping roads and lovely scenery and flowers by the side of the road and rather less wind so I don't remember much before Mendocino. This is rather like Carmel on a slope without the big-name shopping, or Capitola without the suburbs and it looked very charming but we didn't spot anywhere to stay apart from Blair House (which was Jessica's house in Murder She Wrote) so we pushed on to Fort Bragg, then realised the redwood elk meadow we're looking for is back in Van Damm state park. How Belgian!

Fort Bragg is not a fort, it's a mid-sized town that mixes tourism and a real town life, so it has a bowling alley as well as a Best Western and a brewery and a train trestle. We had dinner at the brewery, North Coast Brewing, sharing fish and tiger shrimp in Scrimshaw beer batter and a ten-beer tasting for $4. Red Seal and Brother Thelonius and Blue Star and Old Rasputin and ACME IPA were the standouts. Hic. Yawwwwn...

We have seen wild turkeys (wait till Thanksgiving, they'll be livid), llamas, baaaby seals, birds of prey being mobbed by red-winged blackbirds. We saw baby pigeons nestling in a wharf in San Francisco. No whales yet!

Tomorrow we'll look for the glass beach and drive the avenue of the giants and try not to get blown away...

Driving north

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 18:04:40 GMT

That's enough city - and we'll be back on Tuesday - so we're going over Golden Gate and not turning into Napa, in search of redwoods and elk and something new

Late nights and tiny notebooks

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 08:12:42 GMT

Being a guest at the HP partner event is fascinating; being reminded of the sales side and the dealers who push the industry along, meeting folks from Azerbaijan and Turkmenistan, listen to two UK dealers 'discuss' the member of staff poached from one company to another, hearing what HP thinks is economically important in the coming year. We had breakfast meetings and late night boat trips and dinners and interviews and an all-too-brief time to play with the HP Mini-Note and a tour of some of the HP Labs projects and a busy, interesting and fun time. There are so many interesting people at HP doing such a huge variety of things: giant posters and atomic detectors and tiny notebooks and toasty big data centres. Now I have to edit the Mini-Note photos and get some sleep before our next breakfast meeting and a chance to play with the Slacker portable Internet radio... sleep. I remember that.

Back to the city

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 08:05:29 GMT

We've had a week of work and writing at the RSA conference, an afternoon off to drive down the coast to Santa Cruz (Sam's Chowder House does a great lobster roll and the deep-fried lemon slice in with the artichokes was surprisingly good; tangy and slightly caremlised), a long weekend of socialising and hot-tubbing and running errands and selling more books than we bought at Book Buyers and spending the proceeds on thai angel wings (chicken wings stuffed with minced chicken and herbs) and having brunch at Hobees and visiting the Computer History Museum with rowanf and galileopan and writing, and now we're back up the the city for more work (and I'm writing in the car on the way).

So. Suitcases packed and loaded? Check
Pink Floyd playing on KFOG? Check
Going to San Francisco? Check
Flower in my hair? Check
Know the way back for San Jose for the weekend after next? Check!

For the mathematically minded amongst you

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 04:40:56 GMT

Savings rates; I'm sure they're designed to confuse me. Which of these actually pays better interest (both ISAs, so no tax to complicate things)?
6.25% on an investment of £3,600, paid annually
7% on an investment of £300 a month, totalling to £3,600, paid annually - and labelled as 7% AER...

Flakes on the plane

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 22:39:56 GMT

Driving to Heathrow in the snow is very pretty. A plane covered in snow looks pretty too and it's fun to watch the de-icer but when it runs out half way through, you do tend to take off late. Greenland was under cloud but Canada had snowed in mountains and cracking sea ice and I saw a volcano and we went round the bay FIVE times! land ho...

Photo blog racing

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 22:37:24 GMT

column of prisms off Regent Street

snow!

Sun, 06 Apr 2008 07:07:20 GMT

I think this means I'm not wearing my capri pants for the flight to San Francisco!

Idio(t)lect

Sat, 05 Apr 2008 00:15:35 GMT

1. A body of water, smaller than a river, contained within relatively narrow banks.

Sinuous rill

2. What the thing you push around the grocery store is called.

That which might be found in a river

3. A metal container to carry a meal in.

takeaway
4. The thing that you cook bacon and eggs in.

kitchen

5. The piece of furniture that seats three people.

the *big* chair

6. The device on the outside of the house that carries rain off the roof.

clepsydra
7. The covered area outside a house where people sit in the evening.

the pub

8. Carbonated, sweetened, non-alcoholic beverages.

sugar water

9. A flat, round breakfast food served with syrup.

pikelet

10. A long sandwich designed to be a whole meal in itself.

pan bagna

11. The piece of clothing worn by men at the beach?

raincoat

12. Shoes worn for sports.

Nike

13. Putting a room in order.

spring cleaning

14. A flying insect that glows in the dark.

solar firefly jar

15. The little insect that curls up into a ball.

earwig

16. The children's playground equipment where one kid sits on one side and goes up while the other sits on the other side and goes down.

the economy

17. How do you eat your pizza?

no white on the egg, please

18. What's it called when private citizens put up signs and sell their used stuff?

eBay

19. What's the evening meal?

served later than it should be

20. The thing under a house where the furnace and perhaps a rec room are?

horror movie

21. What do you call the thing that you can get water out of to drink in public places?
water bottle

Your tomorrow today: just part of our last trip

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 12:28:30 GMT

When Microsoft couldn't get me to TechFest as planned, we decided we still wanted to go to a conference about emerging technology - how handy that O'Reilly was running one that week and that a friend reminded us at just the right time. It's like spending a week mainlining gadget blogs, New Scientist and Usenet but with other people in the room - lots of really smart, really interesting people. I wish I could have got to more sessions and sometimes I picked the interesting (food hacking, Violet Blue on constructing online sexuality) over the professionally interesting (understanding debugging, open source hardware). There's a big writeup over on Tom's Hardware of what we did see...
From nanoscale processing to measuring and simulating crowds, from phone calls inside your browser with Adobe’s Flash-based Pacifica service to Google on your phone with Android, from Google predicting the future to the Department of Defense taking nine months to build a wiki to speed up procurement, ETech looked at what might emerge next.

I disapprove of consoles on principle: plus a lesson in interviewing

Thu, 03 Apr 2008 12:12:37 GMT

The BBC micro was the first computer I got my hands on; I spent weeks writing a program to draw the Union Jack (you can tell I'm not a natural programmer!). It was the era when the PC and the Mac were becoming available, but when you could also replace your 8-bit gaming machine with a 16-bit gaming machine of dubious ability (Enterprise Elan anyone?) or a true home computer like the ST or Amiga. Even on a gaming machine you were probably typing in the last of the games listings. You got your hands dirty with these machines. Moving into either programming or just thinking programmatically was a natural progression (read Jeanette Wing of CMU on why computational thinking should be on the curriculum with the three Rs). Consoles were slicker, glossier, faster - and I think they deprived us of a generation of programmers, because fewer people were challenged to start tinkering and if they wanted to tinker they couldn't.

Extreme Tech's interview with Alex St. John, one of the original DirectX developers, has him arguing that the day of the console is done. Never say never; it's a huge industry that's profitable the way razors and printers are, but his argument about changing economics is persuasive. And I love the way he ends up with the interviewer answering the questions; it's a judo flip someone extrememly knowledgeable can do, but the interviewer makes a good if slightly tetchy recovery.[My snark in italics]

ASJ: [argues that the Wii proves cheap graphics are good enough for consoles]. That means that if there is another generation, it's gotta be about either input devices, or online community. Graphics will just be good everywhere. And if it's about community, that puts the console out of business. Because why the hell does Wal-Mart want to sell a money-losing loss leader device, when all the valuable content will be tied to online services and subscriptions and downloadable stuff? So for all the talk about downloadable content on the console, the console depends on the retail channel for that market to be valuable, and the retailer, if they don't get a cut of that, is going to say why the hell am I trying to sell these consoles at a loss for?

ET: [this is where the interviewer starts having a conversation rather than running an interview; always very tempting when you have someone smart to talk to] True…there were rumors last year that the next PlayStation would not have an optical drive. Everything would be downloaded.

ASJ: Yeah. Yeah, that's a good—that's a very interesting—and here's another point. Why is World of Warcraft the most profitable game on the PC?

ET: [definitely conversation now] Community.

ASJ: Yeah, but what makes it so profitable? There are a lot of community games out there. What is it about a massive multiplayer game that makes it make so much revenue? Is it just community?

ET: [aaaand swiftly back to interview mode!] Why don't you tell me?

ASJ: There's one very important feature: DRM. You can't f---ing steal the thing.

ET: Ah. Gotcha.

ASJ: You can't pirate a community. So an MMO has two properties that make it hugely valuable. One is community; frankly, that's almost secondary. The truth is, you can't steal a community-based game. And because you can't steal it, you get all the revenue from it. All a console is is a giant DRM device. A console's job is not to enable you to play games, but to stop you from playing games you didn't pay for.

[A lot of interviews go like this in real life. But a lot of editors and some readers prefer the interviewer to take out their interjections and would have wanted the back and forth edited to sound like ASJ asking and answering rhetorical questions; one of the rules of journalism is that the writer is not part of the story and should absolutely never be in the way of the story. I loathe Sunday magazine interviews that are all about the interviewer's arrival at the location, their reaction to the decor, their family anecdotes, their alleged rapport with the celebrity, their sparkling conversation and only peripherally an actual interview. But podcasts and blogs are taking the broadcast interview model where the interviewer is on screen and can't be edited out; plus there's a trend to personalised writing and the journalist as expert making a personal connection with the reader. I think this is a charming example of the interviewee turning the tables briefly and perhaps I'm only imagining 'Why don't you tell me' coming from slightly gritted teeth']

Google invents personal jetpack

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 14:35:02 GMT

Maybe when you have your own plane, everywhere looks like a runway. Maybe the Google boys have an underground drilling machine a la Oceans 13, or a Segway that climbs over roofs. Can't see quite how else you would actually manage to take the suggested public transit route on Google Maps from our hotel to the RSA conference next week. Maybe you can get through the Westfield Center but you'd have to break into an awful lot of businesses to take this route at ground level.

It's Make Not Suck not Make Suck Less

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 00:17:38 GMT

I know it's a preview of a new version of search for Vista, but given that I like Vista and I like Search in Vista like the Tin man ('most of all'), having the announcement say 'fixes most of the reported bugs' is underwhelming me somewhat. When did that become the target to shoot for? I understand Microsoft underpromising and over-delivering - big improvement on the other way round - but this is "the second most popular desktop OS ever" (S Ballmer), the future of Windows, the ongoing rolling development model. This ATM pays out most of your money. This bag contains most of your shopping. Not quite doing it for me as a concept...

In other news: we had a lovely Easter with tanais (hope you had fun too epredota!), some DIY and some decoupage, meaning my wooden drawers look good rather than icky. And today was at least half made of awesome because the ever-impressive Ceri @SnarlHair did a fabulous job on my new braids, colours chosen by sbisson - white, blonde, pale green, peachy-orange, 'petrol' green (pale green, mid-green, blue). They're sleek, shiny and stiff. They took nearly six hours this time because Ceri did them thin and long enough for my hair to grow in to - right down to the widest part of my hips, several inches beneath my waist. Getting to Muswell Hill wasn't as much fun as: I forgot my glasses (uncomfortabe 'what's wrong, where are my glasses' twitches all day, plus myopic peering at buses), I forgot my phone (with the directions and map tools on so I had to keep turning on the laptop and writing on my hand and couldn't text himself), the Picadilly line caught fire so I had to backtrack to Earls Court and a combination of 1+3 led to me rushing around looking for a tube map and tripping smack over the bag the charming gentleman had left sticking out across the width of the platform. I fell with a book in one hand, a banana in the other, a cardigan and jacket under my arm and the laptop in a bag on my back, flat on my face (ankle through the bag strap); I think I must have done a breakfall as I didn't even squash the banana and have no visible bruises but I have been lolling around asking to be cosseted ever since I got back.

I like my braids though!

What Mary is doing this weekend...

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 17:41:11 GMT

Decoupage on an Ikea drawer unit...