Category: Uncategorized

Three weeks ago, my email Inbox contained 4,568 messages. Of which 250 were ‘unread.’ This was not, I’m willing to admit, an ideal situation.

As of today – and following an inordinate amount of time I seem to have been spending on the train of late – it contains merely 216 messages. Number of those unread: zero. And most, were I prepared to spend a few dull minutes, could be moved into my new ‘Dealt With’ folder.

But I’m not going to do that right now, because I’ve just spent a jolly couple of hours hitting squiggly-K in NetNewsWire, with the result that (at least until its next scheduled refresh at ten to five) I have zero unread posts showing there, too.

Do not worry, dear reader: I am unlikely to suddenly start subscribing to some over-fangled ‘Getting Things Done’-type hoo-hah. For that matter, I’m unlikely to become noticeably better at replying to emails. But I am, for the moment, basking in a curiously open, spacious environment.

Next up: clearing the desktops of my Macs. Ugh, how does so much crap accumulate there?

Oh crap.

I claim to be a cyclist, but it’s all rather past tense at the moment. True, I have been out on the bike twice this week… but only twice. I’m far from fit, and one of the depressing aspects of trying to get back into it again is that… well… OK, 34 isn’t old as such, but I’m certainly less readily adaptable than I was ten years ago.

And now there’s a cock-a-mamie scheme by a bunch of bloggers to drag their sorry arses up Mont Ventoux, at the end of September.

Oh, I’d love to do that. And a few weeks ago I sort-of promised myself that I’d get fit enough to think about a little tour around that sort of time…

The worst thing is that I have a really good excuse: I’ve absolutely no idea what I’m going to be doing in September, but I pretty much have to be working in some way or another. Trying to get this SciCast thing off the ground required me to turn down TV work, with the result that I’m frighteningly skint. My best guess: lost earnings of about £7,000. Seriously.

It’s been worth it, but the whole situation is sufficiently precarious that as of late July I’m seriously in need of work. Or maybe August – something small and lovely might have come along. Anyway, committing to anything at the end of September isn’t a great idea, right now.

(and before anybody says ‘take a leap of faith! Sign up, it’ll be fine’ – bog right off, OK? That’s exactly what I did with SciCast, and while I’ve no regrets I’m not exactly in a gambling mood, m’kay?)

Scoble says: ‘It’s all about HDTV‘. He’s referring to the HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray war, XBox360 vs PS3, ‘dark fibre,’ network (non-)neutrality, and so on.

Something just struck me: a few years ago, the mobile phone industry in Europe was all about 3G networks, about how – by now, note – we’d all be viewing video clips on our mobile phones. That is, we’d all be streaming the World Cup (England vs. Portugal across my desk on the PC as I type here…) to our mobile handsets.

That didn’t happen. 3G is technically quite interesting, but in the end we didn’t want it. Or at least, we remain ‘unconvinced by the value proposition.’ That is: it’s hopelessly expensive and we’re about as likely to cough up for it as we are to auction our own grandmothers. The latter, note, would in most situation be more useful, too.

Is HDTV the same thing all over again?

Oh, sure, you can point to all manner of supposed HDTV success stories, and to some extent HD is inevitable – there’s enough of a move to high-def production within the TV industry that, just as with 16:9 widescreen, you’re going to get it whether you like it or not.

But one could counter with the growing popularity of YouTube, RocketBoom, and the like. Far from demanding ever-higher picture quality, are we in fact increasingly comfortable with lower production values?

If that’s the case, then anyone betting the farm on HD is going to be mightily surprised – and will look mightily stupid – in 5 years’ time. Just like the people who coughed up billions for 3G licenses.

Via – where else? – Metafilter – the Collier Classification System for Very Small Objects. Lovely, lovely concept, though I do wish the resulting names were just a tad more pronounceable.

Also, does it remind anybody else of the sort of thing Ben Schott might do?

For reasons I don’t quite understand – well, I do understand, I just don’t quite agree with the interpretation – a couple of fairly prominent Mac users are switching to Ubuntu’s GNU/Linux distribution. Which is fine. If it does what they need, good luck to them. I’m thinking of dusting off my old K6 desktop and trying Ubuntu on it too, and am hampered only by a marked lack of spare monitors round these parts. Oh, and the basic problem that there’s nothing – nothing that’s important for me, at least – I can do on Linux that I can’t do on OS X. Also, I don’t have a quasi-religious passion for ‘free’ (as-in-have-you-any-idea-how-nonsensical-this-phrase-is?) software. But hey, hedged bets and everything, I’m still interested.

No, what worries me about Cory’s migration in particular is his declared aim of ‘documenting every step of [his] switch‘ at Boing Boing. Oh please, please don’t do that, Cory. I’m already a tad fed up with the sheer volume of posts on that site, and more posts doesn’t help at all. Particularly if they’re off-topic for the blog. See, Boing Boing is ‘a directory of wonderful things’ – my perception is that it’s about the lovely, the unexpected, the dramatic, the impressive, the quirky, the alarming, the plain interesting. Its strength is the diversity of its stories.

It’s already arguable that all the DRM activism stuff is misplaced – why isn’t that at an EFF blog, again? – but if they add platform evangelism too, well… sheesh, I don’t know. Particularly if that category of post is coming from Cory, who can be prolific in a please-stop-I-can’t-take-it-any-more sort of way.

It’s not that I don’t want to read about Cory’s Ubuntu experience. I do. Pilgrim’s list of Ubuntu/Linux software is extremely useful, for example, and it’s clear from that alone that desktop Linux has come a long way since I last tried it. I just don’t want to read this sort of stuff at Boing Boing, because it doesn’t fit my image of what Boing Boing is.

Perhaps I’m being ‘old-media’ to think that the audience is important. But Boing Boing’s signal:noise seems to have been falling of late, and I’m not alone in thinking that.

(next target: Make. Which really should post less than fifteen things an hour).

I’m sorry. I know I should be above such things. But I still find this story completely giggle-worthy, in a sniggering schoolboy sort of way.

I’ll grow up, eventually.

My friend Debs’ films with Richard Dawkins about religion, ‘Root of all Evil?’, have been put up on Google Video – notably without the somewhat crucial title question mark, and also presumably in violation of copyright – apparently by a new-ageish forum group (who will probably complain if they get wind of my calling them ‘new-ageish,’ but at least those complaints might help me work out what they’re actually about without wading through reams of forum posts developing a picture for myself. What, you expect journalism here? Get a grip!)

Anyway: Part 1 here; part 2 here.

From the release notes:

iChat:

Addresses potential causes of “insufficient bandwidth” alerts in iChat.

If a conference doesn’t start as expected, iChat will now offer to send a report to Apple for investigation.

Ohpleaseohpleaseohpleaseohplease…

(video chat is one of those things that’s surprisingly useful, and surprisingly irritating. The combinations of clients and routers that actually work together in practice appears to be almost vanishingly small, and every time I’ve tried to do it, it’s driven me up the wall. The common failure in iChat AV is ‘insufficient bandwidth’ – which usually means something else entirely – though it’s also rather fond of ‘…did not respond.’)

One of the ongoing grouses about the (bollocks horrid jargon phrase alert!) blogosphere (all clear!) is the (supposed) existence of an ‘A-list’ of bloggers whose combined popularity has spiraled ever upwards, to the (supposed) disadvantage of ‘the rest of us.’

Well, basically, get over it sunshine, some people are just better at it than you are. That argument aside – and speaking as somebody hovering just below the D-list of the blog world – the conference-junkie peer-respect thang is simultaneously both appealing and irrelevant.

So I won’t pretend not to experience a little thrill every time The Daily Grind here happens to pick up a stray comment or link from somebody whose blog I read. I find it quite scary – as I’ve mentioned many times, I tend to assume nobody reads this shit, and the thought that People Of Note might, in fact, do so is probably enough to put me right off it, if I really thought about it. But I also find it gratifying. It’s nice to be noted by people I respect.

But here’s what I suspect’s been going on of late: I think, at some recent bloggers’ shindig – which I could have attended had I been in London/San Francisco/wherever the hell BloggerCon was – a bunch of A-listers got drunk one night. Collectively, they decided to all show up at some poor unsuspecting obscure blogger’s site, and start linking and leaving comments. Just to, you know, freak them out.

How else can I explain Hammersley and Marks suddenly popping up in my comments, and now Euan Semple claiming to have seen the downloadable Guardian story here?

I’m being A-bombed. It’s the only rational explanation.

You watch, next I’ll have Winer and Kottke and Cory and Arrington and Scoble and Malkin and Zeldman all show up.

Bastards.

From what I can tell reading this NASA page, the answer is: pretty much how we got there in the first place. Which is either clever and efficient re-use of existing technology… or wildly underwhelming, depending on your point of view. What I find alarming, however, is how easy it is to find things to be snide about. A bit of a manned spaceflight rant from me, after the fold:

Continue reading “How we’ll get back to the moon” →