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According to Google, this site is the top hit for the search “ugly wedding dress“. That’s… er… unexpected.

Today was my dad’s seventieth birthday. We bought him an iPod Shuffle. Tonight, he emailed me:

Hi,

It WORKS.

Dad

My dad is cool.

Mac-head tools for your delectation: I’ve long been a fan of MacRabbit’s CSSEdit, which puts a smooth OS X interface on the tricky voodoo that is writing stylesheets. Another tool I suspect I’ll add to the arsenal, however, is Cultured Code’s Xylescope, which does some terribly clever stuff with outlining and DOM selection and… well, you sort of have to see for yourself. It’s also uncommonly beautiful in the way it presents itself. Highly recommended.

…all of which is a curious introduction to noting that I’ve more-or-less finished Mechannibals, and more-or-less started the next job, which consists of finally finally finally doing the How2 website correctly. Hurrah.

Was it just me who found waking up to Just a Minute entirely disturbing? Almost as if there was something subtly but fundamentally wrong with the universe this morning.

Favourite band of the last couple of months – The Go! Team. I stumbled across them through the iTunes Music Store, where one of their singles was a free download of the week back in February or somesuch. Their album, Thunder, Lightning Strike!, I picked up as soon as I could find it. Three months later, I still absolutely love them.

They played on Later… with Jules Holland the other night – always a sure sign of a future hit – and they’re touring right now, in some weird places but notably the John Peel stage at Glastonbury. The album’s hard to characterise. It’s been likened to a blend of sunshine funk mixed with early hip-hop, but that description fails to capture its fundamental joyousness. It’s also been compared to the theme songs of early-mid-80s American pulp TV, which I find more of a stretch to recognise until I realise that pretty much every track I want to use as backing or title music.

They’re worth a listen; available on the iTunes Store, or via Amazon UK and US. Meanwhile, a previous favourite band of mine, The Baker Brothers, have their second album out next week – In With the Out Crowd. Well, it’s a live cut mostly of material from the first album, but it still counts. And I still want to use all their stuff in shows, too.

An unexpected feature of television – one suspects, any project-based work – is the curious ennui one feels following completion of the last gig.

Yes, we’ve wrapped on Mechannibals, the final show being recorded in Rugby over the last few days. Not my favourite, actually, mostly because we were all knackered and it was consequently more difficult than it strictly needed to be. But the machines were massively different, amusing in their performances, and basically worked – which puts the series average at some ridiculous percentage that’s pretty much unprecedented for this sort of thing. Job done, basically.

Nevertheless, a curious feeling. The usual wrap euphoria seems to exactly balance the inevitable relief at having survived a shoot which has been, at times… shall we say ‘difficult’? It’s a somewhat familiar situation, to be honest, though either I’m getting less thick-skinned as the years go on, or the series was genuinely more like hard work than is common.

What usually happens – and doubtless will in this case – is that the memory of the angst fades more quickly than that of the joy, with the slightly bizarre result that television is, for the most part, something one enjoys doing predominantly in retrospect. I’ve remarked on this previously, but as some of you have been aware, Mechannibals has been somewhat starker than most. But hey, we survived; nobody was seriously injured; we had moments and even extended periods of considerable fun; and the results coming out of the edit suites are really rather good.

Speaking of results – those of you in the UK should be able to see the series on BBC2 later in the year. Most likely 7:30pm, midweek, perhaps from August. I will, of course, post here when I know for sure. My current best guess is that it’ll be a heap of fun to watch, so look out for it.

O2 finally deigned to provide me with a porting code so I can liberate my mobile number from them and whisk it away to another provider. Any other provider, frankly, my experience with O2 over the last year having been less than stellar. The final straw should have been them tripling GPRS data charges last year, but in fact it was them once again failing to itemise my bill properly last week. That makes… 12 months in a row. Anyway, this afternoon I tried to buy a new phone, a Sony Ericsson V800.

“Oooh no,” said the ned in the Vodaphone shop. “You don’t want to go there.” I didn’t? “No no no. Lovely phone, really nice bit of kit, but 3G is bollocks.”

This was news to me. And, most likely, to whatever genius at Vodaphone paid £22bn or whatever it’s cost them. What, I wondered, was the problem?

“Coverage. It’s rubbish, unless you’re standing in a city centre.”

But surely the phone falls back to GSM?

“In theory, yes. Doesn’t work very well. Most people bring ’em back. Shame, they’re great phones.”

Somewhat disarmed by this rampant display of honesty from a mobile phone salesman, I beat a hasty retreat, pausing only to consider the S700. I considered it gigantic and ugly. Nice try, but some designs are clearly destined for greatness (clamshells), whilst others are clearly evolutionary dead-ends (twist things, which haven’t even penetrated the popular psyche enough to receive a decent name, despite there having been quite a few over the years).

On to Orange, who greet me with a beautifully-designed shop, neatly-displayed products, an ambience of modern professionalism, and a wildly smarmy salesman. Close, Orange, but no cigar. So, let’s have a look-see:

Motorola Razr v3: Beautiful object, crap camera, lousy memory, and the phone book allegedly can’t handle contacts with more than one number. Idiots.

Nokia 6170: Fab little Nokia clamshell. No Bluetooth: no sync, no Salling Clicker. Game over.

Nokia 3230: Terribly stylish new 1.2megapixel cameraphone, really rather handy thing. Still doesn’t sync properly with Macs. May be hackable, but dig around a little and there are some very negative reviews out there. It’s a low-end phone with lots of corners cut, like… it doesn’t have enough memory to actually work. Nope, not falling for that one.

Sony Ericsson K700: Cute thing, crap keypad, good software, fair camera… and the K750 is just around the corner. With a much better autofocus camera, but still a crap keypad. So… no, not just now.

Oh, why is it so hard? All I want is a phone that plays nicely with my Mac (ie. standards-based address syncing) and has a half-decent camera. Arrrghhhh!

(and to top it all, the realisation that I’m going to go through exactly this, every year)

A couple of years ago, Gavin Smith did a couple of series for me as a Researcher. Which in the hierarchy of production teams is barely a rung above ‘serf’ – you get to boss around the runners, but that’s about it, and even some runners feel sufficiently sure of themselves to bite back.

Now, the self-same Mr. Smith not only has a slick business card, but also fawning articles in the Evening Times all about him. Every time I call, he seems to be at an airport en route to some exciting conference destination like New York or Cannes. And increasingly, my calls are about my working for him, and not the other way around.

Lesson number one of business: never be rude to the doorman, for today’s doorman is tomorrow’s managing director.

Richard Noble is an interesting character. Known mostly for driving Thrust2 to the world land speed record, and managing the ThrustSSC project that broke the sound barrier, he’s also had a few side projects that have left him seriously jaded about the state of engineering and business innovation in the UK. His most recent attempt was the Farnborough F1 aircraft, designed around the concept of quick-turnaround charter ‘air taxi’ services. It’s apparently a dead project, even their web presence being defunct.

However, as with several of Noble’s ventures, it turns out that he may have been right after all. Or perhaps almost right. DayJet.com is a new American venture to offer charter services, built around a large fleet of the new Eclipse 500 twin-turbofan aircraft. But as Robert Cringley points out – and one wonders if this is what Noble missed – it’s not the aircraft that’s important. It’s the scheduling software.

Managing a fleet of jets with constantly-changing departure and destination points, whilst trying to minimise costs to deliver both maximum occupancy (through customer take-up of the quoted price) and the largest possible margins… it’s the traveling salesman problem writ large. Evidently, it’s taken a couple of Russian PhDs two years to reach the stage where DayJet is willing to launch. Intriguingly, it seems they thought about selling the software to other providers, but in the end realised that the availability of suitable aircraft limits the growth rate of the industry, since there’s a minimum number of aircraft in a given region below which the whole system falls apart. “Our greatest limiting factor turns out to be the rate at which Pratt & Whitney can make jet engines,” says the founder.

Cringley’s worth reading on this one, in part because he posits the obvious next question: what happens if you apply similar software to car pooling schemes? Oh, and he’s quite interesting in the rest of the article, too, about the iTunes Movie Store we all assume is just around the corner, and licensing the iPod.

He kept his deposit, which is something of a landmark for the Scottish Green Party. At one point it was looking dicey, but somehow about six bundles of a hundred votes each must have escaped our notice, since he was well over the required 5% of the poll. Only 1% behind the Conservatives, too.

The count, meanwhile, was quite an experience. Glasgow turns out to be rather more modern in the way it presents itself than Leeds was – heck, they use sans-serif type, which I don’t think had even been invented when Leeds last updated its presses. Also, the count is held in the bland modernity of the Scottish Exhibition and Conference Centre, so the result is disappointingly more professional than I’d expected. But it still consists of table after table of three nameless workers sifting through ballot papers and flattening them into piles. Later, they sort the piles by vote cast, at which point some triads reveal astonishing incompetence while others flow like choreographed dancers, their hands flashing across the table with nary a collision. Finally, the piles are counted, recounted, and checked.

…which all takes about four hours. If I omit to recall the lengthy ‘standing around waiting for something to happen’ parts, however, it was quite exciting. I’m glad, however, that I thought to take the long lens for my camera, since I got to snipe pictures of people with clipboards and interestingly earnest faces. Pictures to follow, since I’m still living in a world where polling stations are staffed by grannies, type has block serifs, and cameras shoot on real film.