Month: February 2003

I was recently reminded of something I said over a year ago, that’s still the single quote of which I’m most proud. Curiously, it came out of a good old-fashioned baseless argument, of the kind in which I’m usually least interested.

A colleague and I were arguing about chocolate. She extolled the virtues of milk chocolate: I advocated dark. This particular colleague hated to lose an argument, even if that meant agreeing to disagree. At length, matters descended to:

Look, I’m a woman, and women understand chocolate. Milk is better.

To which I responded, somewhat disconsolate:

Ah yes, but I am a man, and we understand bitterness.

We both took the resulting silence to indicate mutual satisfaction with our statements of final position. And I, for one, will quote that line for the rest of my life.

I woke up each day last week with The Cure’s ‘Close to Me’ going round in my head. Today, I woke up with New Order’s ‘Every Little Counts’ running.

What’s that about? Am I regressing to GCSEs? Will it be something from Talking Heads’ Little Creatures next week? What should I do if Joy Division starts up?

Birruva discussion kicking off again about (ancient history but way ahead-of-its-time) Newton vs. (WinXP with a pen screen) Tablet PC. It seems to have started when Robert Scoble wrote:

By putting ink into a real OS and not just a Palm device, Microsoft has brought us something dramatically new. Apple never had that vision with the Newton.

…which is unfortunate, since that was exactly what Newton was. It was a ‘real OS’ by any metric I can think of, and also something dramatically new. Arguably far more so than any retrofit of a desktop OS, in that it directly addressed the specific problems of what one actually wants in a handheld. As a result – and as I’ve posted here before – Newton can today do a whole raft of stuff that’s beyond any other handheld. While Psion’s stuff runs it close, you have to remember that there’s five years’ more development in those things.

The other thing Scoble misses is that there really were A4-size tablet Newtons. Sure, they were prototype units that were never sold commercially, and I have to wonder how the hardware of the day coped with the demands. Then again, I wonder what ‘Newton’ was really like – what we got was ‘Newton Jnr,’ a cut-down hack to ship the bloody thing.

However, I can’t get too uppity for two reasons. First, it’s not clear to me that handheld and slate computing in the manner of Newton is strictly comparable to ‘Tablet PC’ ideas, in that they’re really addressing different sorts of use. Second, Apple poured a heap of money into Newton and pretty much lost the lot. It’s not clear to me that Microsoft’s luck will be any better this time round.

Mind you, a Tablet PC would be fan-stuffin’-tastic for playing Neverwinter Nights.

Blimey.

So, I’m on a mailing list with a bunch of chums, many of whom now live in the US. Last week we were discussing the BBC, and I chipped in a description of John Peel’s Saturday morning Radio 4 show, Home Truths.

My chum Martin copied it to the editorial office, and stuff me if it didn’t appear in the introduction this morning. You can hear it for yourself, this week only, here (RealPlayer). It’s about two minutes in.

I’m going to have to lie down now. Named by John Peel! John! Peel!

Every time I start typing the word ‘dinosaur’ into Word, it offers to complete it as ‘Dino Micouris.’ All I can tell from Google is that he’s a Toyota MR2 owner. Why he’s in my Entourage address book, I have no idea – particularly since (a.) it wasn’t doing this on Friday, and (b.) I’ve never used Entourage anyway. Weird.

Oh, I love working with talented people.

This afternoon I was writing (slowly…) at home, while my colleagues were partying away at (art consultant) David’s house. They rang me so I could hear the first public performance of (researcher) Gavin’s song. Top stuff.

We’ve been burned by cool-melt glueguns,
Eaten Pringles till it hurts
Made [indecipherable] out of cardboard
‘n said, ‘Dave, please make this work.’

I’ll see if I can’t get a recording up on here somehow. Of course, it’s all in-jokes. Tough.

The whole Europeans are wusses thing continues to fascinate me. In part, because there’s a chunk of the (predominantly ill-informed and nonsensical) allegations to which I’m quite happy to plead guilty. And that, so far as I can tell, is precisely what gets up the Americans’ noses.