Mixed Signals
Any sufficiently advanced information is indistinguishable from noise
Saturday 28 February 1998, 7:00 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
Now it can be told: I'm leaving PC Magazine. Packing my bags, shoving my modem into a red polka-dot tablecloth and tying it to a stick... and going all of 20 metres over the other side of the building to IT Week. Where I'll cease being Technical Editor (Online) and become Technical Editor (With No Brackets Afterwards Whatsoever).
I've been on Mag for more than six years, and it's been fun. I won't miss the modem reviews, but I will miss the people. And there's nothing like a weekly deadline or three to make the heart beat a little faster... add this to that the fact that our first issue will be out on May 18 and every week thereafter, and icicles of panic soon set in.
Which wear off immediately afterwards. This is going to be great fun: news writing has a thrill to it like no other, and the upside to short deadlines is that you don't stay doing the same thing for too long.
Watch this space for further developments...
Tuesday
Deirdre C, my Irish friend and all-round top woman, returns from Florida. And New Orleans, where she has apparently been partying her bits off during the Mardi Gras celebration. By way of a memento, she's brought me a huge trunk of masks, feather boas, voodoo equipage and miscellaneous glittery things - and I've taken it into the office.
I must report that when confronted with an inoperable copy of Internet Explorer 4.0, it doesn't do the software any good if one dresses up in peacock feathers, sequins, blue glitter wig, a large hooded mask, a larger purple feather boa and waves a voodoo doll in front of the hapless PC. But it does make one feel a great deal better - and causes no little concern among one's workmates.
Wednesday
Those awfully nice Pace people turn up, clutching press packs containing stories about new modems. To be expected - but there's other stuff in there too. Expect the unexpected, as they say, with a range of new products coming out over the next few months that I certainly couldn't have predicted. They have a lot to say for themselves about the UK modem market, and complain with some feeling that other companies are shipping 'upgradable 56K modems' bundled with their PC but with no way to upgrade them. Indeed, the companies concerned - Pace reports - sometimes badge the modems with their own name and then fail to recognise them in technical support. Some conversations are reported where the technical support at such a company first tell the caller that the V.90 upgrade will make their modem go faster, and that the caller 'should call the manufacturer' of the modem for details. "Who's the manufacturer?" asked the caller. "Er, well, it's on a bit of paper in the box", said technical support, shortly before refusing to say anything else. All this at 50p a minute premium phone rates, too.
Of course, it could be that the Pace people were exaggerating for effect, but I don't think they are. They wouldn't tell me the name of the company involved... so if you've had a similar experience with a cut-price bundling deal, do e-mail me. I'd quite like to have that conversation myself...
Thursday
My pal the Java developer calls. "You know that Sun versus Microsoft court case?" he whispers, "well, rumour has it that it's been settled out of court and the finishing touches on the joint statement are just being sorted out in time for the Java One conference." He goes on to opine that it's a bit like Clinton versus Saddam, where it's quite clear that one side will win but with so much collateral damage that everyone would be better off just not bothering. The trick, he said, was to give Microsoft the ability to come out of it with face saved. With many new programming and debugging tools coming onto the market and the Java embedded systems business looking particularly healthy, it seems as if the language is going to survive the various problems it has and will genuinely prosper. And about time.
Friday
Mobile phones: gizmo or godsend? Two intrepid explorers from the office - Manek 'Vampire' Dubash and Ed 'Yeti' Henning are even now tending towards the latter point of view... they were invited, you see, to a big industry bash halfway up a mountain in Switzerland. Ed and Manek decided to spend some free time skiing, so caught a train further up and stopped off at a small town, there to hire some skis. Alas, the shop was shut... so they made the best of it and thought they'd walk back down again.
In retrospect, the fact that they set off without proper clothing, a map or any idea of the weather could be seen to be a little unfortunate. They probably realised this themselves as a huge snowstorm closed in, they wandered off the path up to their waists in snow and found themselves in a very tricky position indeed. Disoriented, lost and beginning to get dangerously cold, Ed finally gave up and called the hotel. Or, rather, Manek called PC Magazine to get the dialling code for Switzerland, because his phone still thought it was in England. Then he called the hotel, who got out a snowplough, which came and saved them.
So - for all you who think that the life of a technology journalist is beer, skittles and exciting foreign trips: think again. We risk our very lives to bring you the stories that matter!
More News | ZDNet
I've been on Mag for more than six years, and it's been fun. I won't miss the modem reviews, but I will miss the people. And there's nothing like a weekly deadline or three to make the heart beat a little faster... add this to that the fact that our first issue will be out on May 18 and every week thereafter, and icicles of panic soon set in.
Which wear off immediately afterwards. This is going to be great fun: news writing has a thrill to it like no other, and the upside to short deadlines is that you don't stay doing the same thing for too long.
Watch this space for further developments...
Tuesday
Deirdre C, my Irish friend and all-round top woman, returns from Florida. And New Orleans, where she has apparently been partying her bits off during the Mardi Gras celebration. By way of a memento, she's brought me a huge trunk of masks, feather boas, voodoo equipage and miscellaneous glittery things - and I've taken it into the office.
I must report that when confronted with an inoperable copy of Internet Explorer 4.0, it doesn't do the software any good if one dresses up in peacock feathers, sequins, blue glitter wig, a large hooded mask, a larger purple feather boa and waves a voodoo doll in front of the hapless PC. But it does make one feel a great deal better - and causes no little concern among one's workmates.
Wednesday
Those awfully nice Pace people turn up, clutching press packs containing stories about new modems. To be expected - but there's other stuff in there too. Expect the unexpected, as they say, with a range of new products coming out over the next few months that I certainly couldn't have predicted. They have a lot to say for themselves about the UK modem market, and complain with some feeling that other companies are shipping 'upgradable 56K modems' bundled with their PC but with no way to upgrade them. Indeed, the companies concerned - Pace reports - sometimes badge the modems with their own name and then fail to recognise them in technical support. Some conversations are reported where the technical support at such a company first tell the caller that the V.90 upgrade will make their modem go faster, and that the caller 'should call the manufacturer' of the modem for details. "Who's the manufacturer?" asked the caller. "Er, well, it's on a bit of paper in the box", said technical support, shortly before refusing to say anything else. All this at 50p a minute premium phone rates, too.
Of course, it could be that the Pace people were exaggerating for effect, but I don't think they are. They wouldn't tell me the name of the company involved... so if you've had a similar experience with a cut-price bundling deal, do e-mail me. I'd quite like to have that conversation myself...
Thursday
My pal the Java developer calls. "You know that Sun versus Microsoft court case?" he whispers, "well, rumour has it that it's been settled out of court and the finishing touches on the joint statement are just being sorted out in time for the Java One conference." He goes on to opine that it's a bit like Clinton versus Saddam, where it's quite clear that one side will win but with so much collateral damage that everyone would be better off just not bothering. The trick, he said, was to give Microsoft the ability to come out of it with face saved. With many new programming and debugging tools coming onto the market and the Java embedded systems business looking particularly healthy, it seems as if the language is going to survive the various problems it has and will genuinely prosper. And about time.
Friday
Mobile phones: gizmo or godsend? Two intrepid explorers from the office - Manek 'Vampire' Dubash and Ed 'Yeti' Henning are even now tending towards the latter point of view... they were invited, you see, to a big industry bash halfway up a mountain in Switzerland. Ed and Manek decided to spend some free time skiing, so caught a train further up and stopped off at a small town, there to hire some skis. Alas, the shop was shut... so they made the best of it and thought they'd walk back down again.
In retrospect, the fact that they set off without proper clothing, a map or any idea of the weather could be seen to be a little unfortunate. They probably realised this themselves as a huge snowstorm closed in, they wandered off the path up to their waists in snow and found themselves in a very tricky position indeed. Disoriented, lost and beginning to get dangerously cold, Ed finally gave up and called the hotel. Or, rather, Manek called PC Magazine to get the dialling code for Switzerland, because his phone still thought it was in England. Then he called the hotel, who got out a snowplough, which came and saved them.
So - for all you who think that the life of a technology journalist is beer, skittles and exciting foreign trips: think again. We risk our very lives to bring you the stories that matter!
More News | ZDNet
Saturday 21 February 1998, 7:00 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
See a sneak preview of an absolutely fab cellphone. I can't reveal the name of the manufacturer - because they don't know I know - but it's the bee's knees. It has infra-red connectivity, so you dump it next to your laptop and voila, it's all connected. It has an absolutely splendid user interface, and it's small with a stupendous battery life. And it's dual band.
The best bit, though, is the radio linked cordless headset. The size of a small pen, this tucks behind your ear and communicates with the phone from up to six metres away. So, you can have your phone in your briefcase or pocket and make and receive calls in complete freedom. Stunning, and I want one very badly indeed.
Tuesday
Cambridge Display Technologies has something wonderful to show - a 2" green and black television screen. This is perhaps not exciting for what it does - the first electronic TV display that managed the same feat used a Braun tube and flickered into life sometime in the mid 1920s - but for what it is. The active constituent is plastic.
CDT's light emitting polymers - LEPs - are pretty similar to ordinary plastic. You mix them up in a big bowl. You spread them on something and let them dry. Then you attach electrodes, and they light up. It's just like LEDs or LCDs, only you don't a billion dollar plant to make it: I've seen an LEP made by one bloke in a white coat in a perfectly ordinary chemical lab.
This is undoubtedly going to be one of the hottest technologies of the next twenty years. It has one big drawback - minute contaminations lead to a rapid degeneration of the light output. Water and oxygen don't help. They think it's going to take a while to sort that one out, but when they do - and it's a when, not an if - we'll have cornflake packets with videoscreens. It's going to be that cheap, that ubiquitous, that much fun.
Wednesday
Day off: finally get the police around to check the flat (no dabs, no hope), and my parents turn up with a spare TV, video and stereo that were gracing The Vicarage. They also bring with them an insurance man, who whips out his clipboard and - before I can say Pearl - has the place covered. Hah! Do your worst, blaggers!
Parents terrific in all respects. My father, the flying vicar, is getting very close to his PPL - he regales me with tales of perfect landings and cross-country stints.
Thursday
Shoulder locks solid. Ouch. Now, I've never been blessed with the most athletic, slickly moving of bodies but I've never had much in the way of aches and pains. This comes as an unpleasant surprise. I mail a friend who's an absolute martyr to her RSI and ask 'Could it be...?'
She mails back and says 'Probably. And if you don't get it sorted out now, then I'm never talking to you again'. Don't much fancy never getting drunk with the woman again, so I email human resources and ask for help.
Alyson Nesbitt, long suffering taker of care for all of us, turns up with a risk assessment form. It remains unfilled as she gasps in dismay at my working habits - monitor close to face, piles of stuff everywhere, me sitting on edge of seat. With a sigh, she sorts out a better chair for me and makes some mild recommendations - but will the threat of painful disability cause me to change the habits of a lifetime?
Watch this space.
Friday
It's 42 inches big. It glows in lots of different colours. It's Fujitsu's new 3" thick plasma display and it's utterly, utterly gorgeous.
We've got one in the office, and all work crawls to a halt as various technical editors fight for the right to put up their favourite stuff. We have psychedelic screen savers, DVD movies, FIFA '97 and that infamous Windows desktop, all shining forth across the room in the most luscious colours imaginable.
Good news: it's three thousand pounds cheaper than the old version. Bad news: it's still seven thousand quid. Once they get down to the thousand pound mark, you won't be able to see for the dust raised by the stampede - but I wouldn't be sure that they'll get there before the LEP stuff is in the same ballpark.
Technology marches on. It's a great time to be alive!
More News | ZDNet
The best bit, though, is the radio linked cordless headset. The size of a small pen, this tucks behind your ear and communicates with the phone from up to six metres away. So, you can have your phone in your briefcase or pocket and make and receive calls in complete freedom. Stunning, and I want one very badly indeed.
Tuesday
Cambridge Display Technologies has something wonderful to show - a 2" green and black television screen. This is perhaps not exciting for what it does - the first electronic TV display that managed the same feat used a Braun tube and flickered into life sometime in the mid 1920s - but for what it is. The active constituent is plastic.
CDT's light emitting polymers - LEPs - are pretty similar to ordinary plastic. You mix them up in a big bowl. You spread them on something and let them dry. Then you attach electrodes, and they light up. It's just like LEDs or LCDs, only you don't a billion dollar plant to make it: I've seen an LEP made by one bloke in a white coat in a perfectly ordinary chemical lab.
This is undoubtedly going to be one of the hottest technologies of the next twenty years. It has one big drawback - minute contaminations lead to a rapid degeneration of the light output. Water and oxygen don't help. They think it's going to take a while to sort that one out, but when they do - and it's a when, not an if - we'll have cornflake packets with videoscreens. It's going to be that cheap, that ubiquitous, that much fun.
Wednesday
Day off: finally get the police around to check the flat (no dabs, no hope), and my parents turn up with a spare TV, video and stereo that were gracing The Vicarage. They also bring with them an insurance man, who whips out his clipboard and - before I can say Pearl - has the place covered. Hah! Do your worst, blaggers!
Parents terrific in all respects. My father, the flying vicar, is getting very close to his PPL - he regales me with tales of perfect landings and cross-country stints.
Thursday
Shoulder locks solid. Ouch. Now, I've never been blessed with the most athletic, slickly moving of bodies but I've never had much in the way of aches and pains. This comes as an unpleasant surprise. I mail a friend who's an absolute martyr to her RSI and ask 'Could it be...?'
She mails back and says 'Probably. And if you don't get it sorted out now, then I'm never talking to you again'. Don't much fancy never getting drunk with the woman again, so I email human resources and ask for help.
Alyson Nesbitt, long suffering taker of care for all of us, turns up with a risk assessment form. It remains unfilled as she gasps in dismay at my working habits - monitor close to face, piles of stuff everywhere, me sitting on edge of seat. With a sigh, she sorts out a better chair for me and makes some mild recommendations - but will the threat of painful disability cause me to change the habits of a lifetime?
Watch this space.
Friday
It's 42 inches big. It glows in lots of different colours. It's Fujitsu's new 3" thick plasma display and it's utterly, utterly gorgeous.
We've got one in the office, and all work crawls to a halt as various technical editors fight for the right to put up their favourite stuff. We have psychedelic screen savers, DVD movies, FIFA '97 and that infamous Windows desktop, all shining forth across the room in the most luscious colours imaginable.
Good news: it's three thousand pounds cheaper than the old version. Bad news: it's still seven thousand quid. Once they get down to the thousand pound mark, you won't be able to see for the dust raised by the stampede - but I wouldn't be sure that they'll get there before the LEP stuff is in the same ballpark.
Technology marches on. It's a great time to be alive!
More News | ZDNet
Saturday 14 February 1998, 7:00 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
9:30 AM. A taxi turns up at Goodwins' Heights to take me away. Rockwell Semiconductor Systems has decided to tell the world how clever it is, and to this end is shipping my portly self across to California. Hurrah! Bad news is that this involves sardine-class British Airways for eleven hours there, and ten back... for one day in a tent with a clump of engineers. Worse news, according to the in-flight news, is that El Nino is currently lashing the Left Coast with furious winds and inches of rain, and the normally sun-soaked Californians are having to learn to swim.
Get window seat (good). Slip into meditative haze in which everything below the waist - legs, digestive system, etc - is put into stasis. It's a trick I learned at Glastonbury, allowing me to stay motionless in a field in front of a stage for days on end without needing to use the loos. At first, I needed a combination of mud, cous cous burgers and loud music to get there, but by now I can assume the state with just two stiff whiskies and a glance at the in-flight magazine.
Spend time reading. Digital Nomads - a sixth-form essay someone's mistakenly issued as a book; Release 2.0 by Esther Dyson - low key and either common sense or vapid truisms, and I'm not quite sure which yet; and something on shared consciousness across cyberspace by a French philosopher whose name I forget - if he has such a bourgeois affectation. Typical sentence "We are all immigrants in subjectivity". Hm. Call flight attendant and request the liquid cosh.
Tuesday
Is it Tuesday? Have memories of being stuck at the airport due to the promised shuttle not turning up. However, Rockwell sent a stretch limo by way of recompense. We - three electronic trade journos and myself - played at being gangsters all the way to the hotel. Perhaps a little dangerous on the LA freeway system...
However, today starts at 6:45am. Ugh. Get ferried (by small coach this time) to the tent and fed bagels. Then the day proper begins.
Rockwell, it turns out, is very clever indeed. It makes bits for everything - cellphones, modems, digital cameras, networks, PCs - and more than just bits, it helps its customers put things together too! "We're often asked if we're the Intel of the communications world", said a big cheese, "but we prefer to think of Intel as the Rockwell of the processor market". Ho ho.
There's a fun round-up of the 56k modem market, where the company says that the year-long fistfight over the standard lost them some money but lost US Robotics a lot more. There are some charming presentation slides of a stealth bomber with K56flex written on it, blowing up a 3Com tank. Hm.
Consider asking the CEO whether he thinks we are all immigrants in subjectivity, but settle for asking whether ADSL is going to end up in the same sort of mess as the modem market. He looks sad, and says "Probably. Everyone's being polite to each other at the moment, but it won't take much..."
Other highlights include a trip around their 0.25-micron semiconductor fabrication plant - I glance nervously at the ceiling, where large pipes labelled CHLOROFLURATE and SULFURIC ACID gurgle away; then at the wall where pods of emergency breathing apparatus are clustered every 50 yards or so. Also play with tiny, tiny Japanese cellular phones, new digital imaging toys, music synthesisers, etc, etc. Meet lots of interesting people, talk lots of higgeldy-piggeldy tech, collect business cards. A very successful day.
Wednesday
Ages before the flight back, so me and the rest of the UK contingent schlep down to the beach via the mall. El Nino is having the day off and the sun has got his hat on. Orange County, however, is the land that taste forgot - one shop window has a large, grimacing bronze fantasy warrior and the rubric "Does the art in your home and office reflect the intensity of who you are?". (My 'office art' consists of a small teddy bear clutching a model Concorde, a selection of chips and a perspex-embedded electron gun. Boy, am I intense). End up on a rickety island called Balboa, which is splendidly eccentric: the bars have a range of characters that Hemingway would've been proud of. Get mistaken, repeatedly, for an Australian.
Back to the hotel, back to the airport, get a row of four seats to myself (good!) and spend the next ten hours horizontal. The only way to fly - and there's no Mr Bean on the video! Hurrah!
Thursday
Get back to Goodwins Heights in fine jetlagged muddle. It takes me a couple of minutes to realise that the front room window is open and that the hi-fi, video, synthesiser and every other bit of easily negotiable equipment has gone. They left the 60MHz Pentium desktop on the very reasonable grounds that it wasn't worth lugging, but took the laptop without the power supply.
The local plod turns up, sucks his pencil, "How do you spell synthesiser, sir? Oh well, never mind. We've got spellcheckers on our computers at the station", and disappears without offering any hope that my possessions will ever return. Which leaves me with that Pentium, a government surplus oscilloscope and a large pile of books and CDs. Er, that's it. Wonder briefly about the house, car, wife, kids, washing machine, tasteful art etc that I was supposed to acquire by now, then remember I've had all those but they seem to have got lost somewhere along the way. This is either carelessness or Zen.
Leave flat and spend evening with friends - the only really necessary accoutrement to life. Oh, and a really fast modem, of course...
Friday
Intel finally produces its Intel740 3D graphics chip. I feel for the other companies in the market: it must feel a bit like going in for an apple-picking competition carrying a ladder and a penknife and finding out that your competitor's turned up in a scythe-equipped Harrier. Still, it should help bring some semblance of standardisation to a market that's most noted for its mutant growth forward in all directions.
Wonder what next week will bring...
More News | ZDNet
Get window seat (good). Slip into meditative haze in which everything below the waist - legs, digestive system, etc - is put into stasis. It's a trick I learned at Glastonbury, allowing me to stay motionless in a field in front of a stage for days on end without needing to use the loos. At first, I needed a combination of mud, cous cous burgers and loud music to get there, but by now I can assume the state with just two stiff whiskies and a glance at the in-flight magazine.
Spend time reading. Digital Nomads - a sixth-form essay someone's mistakenly issued as a book; Release 2.0 by Esther Dyson - low key and either common sense or vapid truisms, and I'm not quite sure which yet; and something on shared consciousness across cyberspace by a French philosopher whose name I forget - if he has such a bourgeois affectation. Typical sentence "We are all immigrants in subjectivity". Hm. Call flight attendant and request the liquid cosh.
Tuesday
Is it Tuesday? Have memories of being stuck at the airport due to the promised shuttle not turning up. However, Rockwell sent a stretch limo by way of recompense. We - three electronic trade journos and myself - played at being gangsters all the way to the hotel. Perhaps a little dangerous on the LA freeway system...
However, today starts at 6:45am. Ugh. Get ferried (by small coach this time) to the tent and fed bagels. Then the day proper begins.
Rockwell, it turns out, is very clever indeed. It makes bits for everything - cellphones, modems, digital cameras, networks, PCs - and more than just bits, it helps its customers put things together too! "We're often asked if we're the Intel of the communications world", said a big cheese, "but we prefer to think of Intel as the Rockwell of the processor market". Ho ho.
There's a fun round-up of the 56k modem market, where the company says that the year-long fistfight over the standard lost them some money but lost US Robotics a lot more. There are some charming presentation slides of a stealth bomber with K56flex written on it, blowing up a 3Com tank. Hm.
Consider asking the CEO whether he thinks we are all immigrants in subjectivity, but settle for asking whether ADSL is going to end up in the same sort of mess as the modem market. He looks sad, and says "Probably. Everyone's being polite to each other at the moment, but it won't take much..."
Other highlights include a trip around their 0.25-micron semiconductor fabrication plant - I glance nervously at the ceiling, where large pipes labelled CHLOROFLURATE and SULFURIC ACID gurgle away; then at the wall where pods of emergency breathing apparatus are clustered every 50 yards or so. Also play with tiny, tiny Japanese cellular phones, new digital imaging toys, music synthesisers, etc, etc. Meet lots of interesting people, talk lots of higgeldy-piggeldy tech, collect business cards. A very successful day.
Wednesday
Ages before the flight back, so me and the rest of the UK contingent schlep down to the beach via the mall. El Nino is having the day off and the sun has got his hat on. Orange County, however, is the land that taste forgot - one shop window has a large, grimacing bronze fantasy warrior and the rubric "Does the art in your home and office reflect the intensity of who you are?". (My 'office art' consists of a small teddy bear clutching a model Concorde, a selection of chips and a perspex-embedded electron gun. Boy, am I intense). End up on a rickety island called Balboa, which is splendidly eccentric: the bars have a range of characters that Hemingway would've been proud of. Get mistaken, repeatedly, for an Australian.
Back to the hotel, back to the airport, get a row of four seats to myself (good!) and spend the next ten hours horizontal. The only way to fly - and there's no Mr Bean on the video! Hurrah!
Thursday
Get back to Goodwins Heights in fine jetlagged muddle. It takes me a couple of minutes to realise that the front room window is open and that the hi-fi, video, synthesiser and every other bit of easily negotiable equipment has gone. They left the 60MHz Pentium desktop on the very reasonable grounds that it wasn't worth lugging, but took the laptop without the power supply.
The local plod turns up, sucks his pencil, "How do you spell synthesiser, sir? Oh well, never mind. We've got spellcheckers on our computers at the station", and disappears without offering any hope that my possessions will ever return. Which leaves me with that Pentium, a government surplus oscilloscope and a large pile of books and CDs. Er, that's it. Wonder briefly about the house, car, wife, kids, washing machine, tasteful art etc that I was supposed to acquire by now, then remember I've had all those but they seem to have got lost somewhere along the way. This is either carelessness or Zen.
Leave flat and spend evening with friends - the only really necessary accoutrement to life. Oh, and a really fast modem, of course...
Friday
Intel finally produces its Intel740 3D graphics chip. I feel for the other companies in the market: it must feel a bit like going in for an apple-picking competition carrying a ladder and a penknife and finding out that your competitor's turned up in a scythe-equipped Harrier. Still, it should help bring some semblance of standardisation to a market that's most noted for its mutant growth forward in all directions.
Wonder what next week will bring...
More News | ZDNet
Saturday 31 January 1998, 7:00 AM
Rupert Goodwins' Diary
A member of the PC Magazine editorial team -- who shall remain nameless -- cut himself shaving today. Sliced off a mole, in fact. Oooh! In some pain, faint from loss of blood and with mere seconds of consciousness left, he dashed into his kitchen to search for the Band-Aid. While he was thus engaged, he slowly realised that the situation was complicated by a number of factors: the kitchen windows were large and clear, they faced onto the street and (apart from a thin, greasy film of blood) he was stark ballcock naked.
Summoning the last reserves of mental agility, he immediately ducked out of sight and edged back towards the safety of 'the inner core or sanctum', as Protect and Survive calls the centre of the house. Alas, since he is a member of staff who not only shaves but believes in a certain standard of sartorial presentation, the steam iron was (a) on, (b) standing upright and (c) now pressed into his right buttock. Our unfortunate colleague will from henceforth be known as 'Tefal Man', and will doubtless be appearing on a Channel 4 chatshow soon.
Tuesday
Well, the DSL consortium (Microsoft, Compaq, Intel, telephone companies and Uncle Tom Cobbley) has woken up and told the world what a good idea it all is to have a permanent 1.5 megabit a second wired into everyone's homes. It'll all be USB and Windows, strangely enough. The company I mentioned last week was Texas Instruments, by the way, but everything had to wait for the Universal ADSL Alliance to show its colours. Or, rather, colors - all the companies involved are American as far as I can see. Also missing, oddly, is Hayes.
Find myself explaining ADSL to a colleague. "So... everyone will have a fast enough link to the Internet to make and send real time, TV quality video?" he said. "Yes." I said. "So everyone will be transmitting home porno movies, downloading ten at once, and videoconferencing their willies?" he said. "Er... probably", I said. "Hm" he said. "Of course, some of us will need more bandwidth than others." Only he could move a conversation from high-speed networking to penile size in two sentences...
Wednesday
One of the simple pleasures of the online world is wandering into an IRC, AOL or CompuServe chatroom and winding up Americans. I have nothing against Americans or America, but there are times when one just itches to get in there and press a couple of buttons... The trick is finding people who can respond in kind.
Surprisingly, some of my more right-wing online sparring partners react very badly when I tell a couple of Clinton jokes (You've heard them already, honest. Oh, OK: "When 500 Washington women were asked whether they'd have sex with Bill Clinton, 490 answered "Not again"".). While none of them seemed to like the man much, they thought that he was the President, dammit, and worth defending on principle. Anything else was demeaning to America. Now, you try feeling the same way about, oh, Blair.
Odd, that.
Thursday
Noises of misery down the phone. A friend of mine has the same morning problems as I do - faced with anything resembling 8am, a temporary yet neurologically profound coma sets in. She's tried to fix it by calling BT and asking for an alarm call every morning, positioned strategically between the alarm going off and her boss achieving low earth orbit. "Any idea how much that costs?", she asked me, "Because I just thought to ask them after all these weeks."
Um. 50p? That seemed about right, so I opened the bidding there. Nope. Sixty. No. Seventy? A quid? A quid fifty? By now, I was beginning to get the idea. The ten second alarm call was sold to the woman under the duvet for no less than two hundred and seventy of your earth pence. Ouch, I said.
Of course, they don't tell you this. Now, if it takes the operator thirty seconds to call the number, wait for it to be answered and say "Alarm call", that's 5 quid 40 a minute. Or three hundred and twenty four pounds an hour - just to wake people up. And I thought consulting in the City was a good payer...
Friday
It's Domain Name Terror again! The US Government (hey, who put them in charge of the Internet? Did I miss something?) is proposing to hand over control of things like .com, .net and what have you to a committee of fifteen bods. These will decide when to add new ones like .vend, .person, .store and so on - after all, .com is heavily oversubscribed. But it's not clear how they'll decide this - a mixture of commercial pressures and residual public service, I suppose.
Why not do things the Internet way? Invent a voting protocol, set up a server, and add the top five new domain name suffixes - as voted for by the great connected - every month. That way it'll all be nicely democratic and if some crass commercial interest wants to get an unfair advantage they'll just have to bribe an awful lot of us.
(Here's the story on news.com. But I have no idea what Denis Norden has to do with it...)
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Summoning the last reserves of mental agility, he immediately ducked out of sight and edged back towards the safety of 'the inner core or sanctum', as Protect and Survive calls the centre of the house. Alas, since he is a member of staff who not only shaves but believes in a certain standard of sartorial presentation, the steam iron was (a) on, (b) standing upright and (c) now pressed into his right buttock. Our unfortunate colleague will from henceforth be known as 'Tefal Man', and will doubtless be appearing on a Channel 4 chatshow soon.
Tuesday
Well, the DSL consortium (Microsoft, Compaq, Intel, telephone companies and Uncle Tom Cobbley) has woken up and told the world what a good idea it all is to have a permanent 1.5 megabit a second wired into everyone's homes. It'll all be USB and Windows, strangely enough. The company I mentioned last week was Texas Instruments, by the way, but everything had to wait for the Universal ADSL Alliance to show its colours. Or, rather, colors - all the companies involved are American as far as I can see. Also missing, oddly, is Hayes.
Find myself explaining ADSL to a colleague. "So... everyone will have a fast enough link to the Internet to make and send real time, TV quality video?" he said. "Yes." I said. "So everyone will be transmitting home porno movies, downloading ten at once, and videoconferencing their willies?" he said. "Er... probably", I said. "Hm" he said. "Of course, some of us will need more bandwidth than others." Only he could move a conversation from high-speed networking to penile size in two sentences...
Wednesday
One of the simple pleasures of the online world is wandering into an IRC, AOL or CompuServe chatroom and winding up Americans. I have nothing against Americans or America, but there are times when one just itches to get in there and press a couple of buttons... The trick is finding people who can respond in kind.
Surprisingly, some of my more right-wing online sparring partners react very badly when I tell a couple of Clinton jokes (You've heard them already, honest. Oh, OK: "When 500 Washington women were asked whether they'd have sex with Bill Clinton, 490 answered "Not again"".). While none of them seemed to like the man much, they thought that he was the President, dammit, and worth defending on principle. Anything else was demeaning to America. Now, you try feeling the same way about, oh, Blair.
Odd, that.
Thursday
Noises of misery down the phone. A friend of mine has the same morning problems as I do - faced with anything resembling 8am, a temporary yet neurologically profound coma sets in. She's tried to fix it by calling BT and asking for an alarm call every morning, positioned strategically between the alarm going off and her boss achieving low earth orbit. "Any idea how much that costs?", she asked me, "Because I just thought to ask them after all these weeks."
Um. 50p? That seemed about right, so I opened the bidding there. Nope. Sixty. No. Seventy? A quid? A quid fifty? By now, I was beginning to get the idea. The ten second alarm call was sold to the woman under the duvet for no less than two hundred and seventy of your earth pence. Ouch, I said.
Of course, they don't tell you this. Now, if it takes the operator thirty seconds to call the number, wait for it to be answered and say "Alarm call", that's 5 quid 40 a minute. Or three hundred and twenty four pounds an hour - just to wake people up. And I thought consulting in the City was a good payer...
Friday
It's Domain Name Terror again! The US Government (hey, who put them in charge of the Internet? Did I miss something?) is proposing to hand over control of things like .com, .net and what have you to a committee of fifteen bods. These will decide when to add new ones like .vend, .person, .store and so on - after all, .com is heavily oversubscribed. But it's not clear how they'll decide this - a mixture of commercial pressures and residual public service, I suppose.
Why not do things the Internet way? Invent a voting protocol, set up a server, and add the top five new domain name suffixes - as voted for by the great connected - every month. That way it'll all be nicely democratic and if some crass commercial interest wants to get an unfair advantage they'll just have to bribe an awful lot of us.
(Here's the story on news.com. But I have no idea what Denis Norden has to do with it...)
More News | ZDNet
