Russell Davies

It's not made by great men

The clapping at around 2:40 is just gorgeous. The original.

Not ready for prime time

I've been reading a lot of opinions about the Apple Watch. How it's just the version 1.0, how it can't do basic things yet, how people should just wait until they get it right, how it's pointless anyway, you can get already get a cheaper time-telling thing and strap it to your wrist. 

I think they're right. And it's an approach that's stood me in good stead.

I, for instance, have been thinking about adopting television for a while now, but on looking at the available options I don't think it's ready yet. I've discovered that some of the screens, if the sun's shining on them, are a bit hard to see, many of them require you to wave some sort of 'remote control' at them in order to determine what pictures and sounds come out - no basic AI capabilities at all! - and many of the 'programmes' shown on television aren't of particular interest to me. That's just a content problem, but it's one they should have solved before rolling it out to a mass market.

So thanks, television, but no thanks. I don't think you're ready for prime time.

Cars too, have been touted as a possible transportation innovation I should be adoptifying but I'm not convinced that they've ironed out all the basic bugs. Many cars, for instance, demand a whole separate room attached to your house for overnight storage, most of them require regular feeding with 'fuel' and the manufacturers have clearly not found the right form-factor yet. There are very few cars big enough to accommodate the transportation needs of even a modest business or church-group and a similarly small number can be kept conveniently in a handbag or backpack. WTF!?

Cars, nice idea, but I don't think you're ready for prime time.

I've also seen a lot of people suggesting something called sarcasm as a great way of writing blog posts but I have to say, I'm not sure.

 

Lookcodebook

Listening to these fantastic programmes about code. I found myself wondering what each of these languages looked like. What is the aesthetic effect of the grammar etc - divorced from the types and eras of screens or cards or whathaveyou they might have been on?

So, to try and compare I grabbed these bits from wikipedia as images.

So, this is what Fortran looks like:

This is what COBOL looks like:

This is what BASIC looks like:

This is what Java looks like:

(Obviously, I imagine that these things look very different in different circumstances, and that this may not be typical and there are other flavours and stuff and that. I was just after a general idea. Leave me alone.)

 

The pace of life, these days, the same

Every now and then I wander into a bookshop and get annoyed by the books they put on the big table at the front. Most of them are normally about how we're living in an accelerated world and everything's speeding up and ohmygodhowcanwecope weneedtodisconnect.

And I always think well yeah, but walking a mile, or three miles or a hundred yards takes about as long as it always has. An hour is still sixty minutes. Pregnancy, no quicker. Getting furniture from a shop still takes ages, especially in the UK. Getting your horse shod - I bet that takes a lot longer these days. Getting planning permission? Has that sped up? I bet it hasn't. Getting to Grade 8 on the bassoon - no quicker these days. It takes longer to die nowadays. It takes longer to get through school. Sand trickles through a narrow gap no quicker. Beethoven symphonies are performed much slower than he wrote them. Watching a film takes longer. Reading Catch-22, still takes longer than you'd like. In fact, all books are too long. Getting to Cornwall still takes forever. And it takes me exactly the same amount of time to walk to the chip shop as it always has and the chips are never on.

Lounge Cafe, Butlin's

Cafe and Bungalows, South Bay, Scarborough

103-109

-10

Ten years ago today, it seems, I was wandering around Portland, taking photos. I wonder how many of these sights are still there.

Cause for Alarm

"Cause for Alarm" by Eric Ambler is a very exciting engineering spy thriller. So worth reading if you like engineering + spies + thrills.

— Rachel Coldicutt (@rachelcoldicutt) March 11, 2015

Rachel is utterly right about Cause For Alarm. Very good in a Rogue Male stylee.

This line sums up the mood:

"It was not until I was soaking blissfully in the steaming water that it occurred to me to wonder why General Vagas thought it necessary to carry a swordstick."

And this is what someone gives as the list of things they import and sell (it's a cover):

"Moroccan perfumes, Czech jewellery, and French bicycles"

Establishment of the geeks

I remember thinking the reason 'we' liked the Olympic Ceremony so much was because it marked the moment where 'our' culture had come top.

We/our meaning, I guess, mostly people like me; white, male, rich, middle-aged, metropolitan, educated, digital, a bit techy, a bit media-y, with a non-southern chip on our shoulder. Or is that just me? (WEIRD)

Increasingly this makes me feel uncomfortable, I'm the establishment. That's bad.

But, on the other hand, it means Radio 4 are making many more programmes aimed directly at me, which is obviously brilliant for me.

Recent favourites, which you might enjoy, if you're like me, of even if you're not:

Tom Armitage on writing, learning and thinking in code.

Aleks Krotoski on Codes that Changed the World.