Peter Judge

Broken British Rail

2010-04-05T10:17:00.000-07:00

I am very sorry, but this is a railfare booking rant.

Everyone knows that the UK rail service - staffed by hardworking people with an occasional urge to strike - is a good one. But, thanks to successive butchering by Tory and Labour governments, and despite a heroic-but-failed effort to produce a web booking system that makes sense of it, it suffers the somewhat-critical problem.

It is, in a nutshell, Impossible To Use.

Everyone has an illustration of what this means is in practice. I don't think mine will add anything, but I'm just putting this down out of sheer disbelief.

I'm travelling to Canterbury with my three daughters one day this week. We're leaving from Herne Hill, and changing at Bromley South. So I decided to buy tickets.

1. I went to the National Rail site, looked up train times, and clicked for a price. £42.20 for the four of us.

2. When I clicked to buy the tickets, I was sent through to the booking pages at Sutheastern where my details were already in a "mixing deck", which offered ma a price of £84.40.

3. Trying to tweak the price by applying student cards and reminding the system that we had one child in the party, produced a welter of different prices, some as low as £66.70

4. Southeastern does not encourage phone calls, but there is a number for Web Support on the site, so I call this. I suspect there is a Web services problem in the communication betweeh the sites.

5. Southeastern's Web support tells me that National Rail does not have live information, so it may be selling me something which has sold out on Southeastern's site. This does not sound likely, as the price has remained on National Rail's site.

6. I decide to try buying by phone, but Southeastern does not advertise a phone number to buy on so I ring National Rail.

7. An Indian voice from National Rail's call centre tells me the trip will cost £42.85 (which turns out to be the price of three Student cards and one child).

8. National Rail's phone service can't sell tickets - same as the web site - so they transfer the call to the operator.

9. The operator tells me that I must click a different - and very mysterious - option on the mixing desk, which specifies travel by one specific operator, and the prices will be cheaper. Only when we find the option does not exist do we realise, I am talking to the wrong operator. National Rail has transfered me to Southern Rail , not Southeastern.

10. Happily, Southern Rail knows the customer service extension at Southeastern's Customer Service centre (you have to choose a customer services option to actually get customer services).

11. Someone at Southeastern's Customer Services has a mysterious knack for making me not want to murder people, and checks through a lot of options, eventually assuring me that the cheapest way to do this is to use two 16-25 Rail Cards, and the tickets will cost £49.10. This turns out to be wrong, but she's so helpful, I don't mind, even when I find out a bit later on.

12. Unhappily Sotheastern Customer Services can't sell tickets themselves. However, the do have the secret of buying Southeastern tickets on the phone. It is not, as National Rail thought, through Southern rail. Oh no, of course not. It's through Southwestern Rail. And she has the number - a closely guarded secret not revealed on Southeastern's phone lines, or (anywhere I could see) on the web site.

13. So I ring Southwestern, and yet again give all my details of travel (I have lost count of how many times I've given them so far) and yet again, a computer works out what I should pay, under the guidance of yet another different person.

14. This time round, it looks like we are going to pay something fairly close to the £49.10, when the Southwestern chap discovers a 2 for 1 offer on adult tickets, which means if Kitty travels as an adult, two of us can go free and the price is two adult returns.

15. To my utter astonishment, the price is the original £42.20. No rail cards required.

16. I pay online and can - I hope - collect the tickets from Herne Hill.

If anyone has read this far, I'm sorry to have put you through all that. I wound up wondering

Why are there multiple prices from multiple sources?
Why, despite automatic ticketing on the web, did I have to make five phone calls to four different companies, and give my travel details five times on the phone, as well as multiple times online, before I could actually buy tickets?
Why does a Southeastern ticket cost less bought on the phone from Southwestern, than it odes bought online from Southeastern?
Is Southwestern even selling the correct tickets?
What is the point of having any sites or call centres that can quote a price, but can't sell a ticket?
Why is anyone involved in setting up this nightmare still employed at all?

Varifocal Contact Lenses - How Do They Work?

2010-01-02T06:26:00.000-08:00

Just before Christmas I got put on a contact lens trial. My eyes have a very difficult prescription, and I've been told that, as middle age progresses, I will eventually need both lenses and spectacles. Now my optician has put me on a commercial trial of varifocal contact lenses, and they seem to fix the problem.

The only trouble is the very existence of varifocal contact lenses seems to contradict a lot of what I thought I knew about optics and vision. And I can't find any good explanation of them anywhere.

I'm sorry this post itself seems to have more type sizes than an optician's chart. That's the Blogger GUI. I know I could sift the HTML to get it straight, but I do that for a living and can't be bothered with it here.

My eyes

My eyes aren't the easiest to work with, but opticians usually get interested when they see them. Their strange prescription has pushed me towards contact lenses instead of glasses - but in recent years, I've been told that eventually lenses alone won't be enough.

I started out with short sight in both eyes - a prescription around -4.5 in both eyes. I also have a coloboma - a birth defect that gives me a great big triangular pupil in my left and a tiny pupil in my right. I've been told the right pupil stops down as small as possible to compensate for the left, but I've realised that actually does not make any sense. Whatever the reason, it's tiny, and never gets very big.

About twenty years ago I had a recurrent corneal erosion problem. I was told I'd never wear contact lenses. Luckily contact lenses got better, because what happened to my eyes ten years ago meant I needed them.

I had cataracts in my right eye lens, so I had it removed, and an implant put in. It's a standard procedure, but - maybe because of the difficulty of working through my tiny pupil, maybe because of some other bit of birth defect - it didn't work too well for me. The old lens came out, but the implant fell from the pocket left for it, and I was left with no lens in the right eye.

That's better than it sounds - an eyeball with no lens in it can still bend light - most of the focusing is done by the cornea - and a short-sighted eyeball will do better in this situation than a long-sighted one. I came out with a very long-sighted right eye, with a prescription of about +5.

The two eyes had such different prescriptions that correcting both eyes with spectacles wouldn't work. The left eye needs a concave lens, while the right one needs a convex lens; put them in glasses, and there's a distance between the lenses and my eyes, so they act as a reducing and a magnifying glass, respectively.

The result is two images which are so different in size, that my brain can't put them together. I tried it in the optician's shop, and it really, really didn't work.

So I tried a pair of glasses with plain glass in the left lens, and then moved onto contact lenses, when daily disposables became gentle enough for my previously-t00-sensitive corneas.

That has been excellent. The combination of my two eyes corrected has been better than any vision I had in my life, including before my cataract problem.

Recently, my eyes have been changing, apparently, and I've had to have the prescription changed - the left eye gets a 4.0 lens, leaving it slightly short-sighted, so it can compensate for the right eye. I've been pushed towards monocular vision - the right eye most of the time and the left eye for close work.

(I guess this is like the problems most people have as their eyes age, except I wouldn't have thought I'd get presbyopia - age-related-shortsightedness caused by stiffening of the lens - as my left eye is already short sighted, and my right eye is no longer using its natural lens.)

Whatever the caue of my changing prescription. I've been warned that as it progresses, the current set-up will stop working eventually, and I'll have to have glasses and contacts. After ten years with no glasses, I'm not looking forward to that.

Varifocals

I was interested to be offered varifocal contact lenses (fortnightly Acuvue lenses using the Oasys material).
- it sounds like a way to avoid glasses
- it's a commercial trial, before the full launch, so very few opticians can offer them
- it's a concept I'm having trouble understanding.

A quick Google search gives us an explanation of varifocal spectacles work. On the Specsavers site, you can see that they have different zones for different distances. For any given thing, you look through the part of the lens you need.

So far I haven't been able to find an explanation of how varifocal contacts work. Sites offering them tend to follow up the question "How do they work?" with non answers, like this "This means that the wearer does not have to change lenses when switching between reading and driving, but care should be taken when driving in bright sunlight."

Varifocal contacts don't make sense to me, because you can't choose which part of the lens you look through. It's stuck on your cornea, and you're using all of it, all the time. You can't choose to use the long-range part of your eye for one thing and the short range for other things.

In simple optics, a lens gathers light and focusses an image, by taking all the light it can from a certain point in the object you are looking at, and gathering it onto one point in the image.

I was told that the varifocal lens would have different zones with different focal lengths. That should mean different images on the retina at the same time, some in focus, some out of focus, depending on the distance.

How is that supposed to help?

And yet, it works!
Just try them, said my optician. So I put them in, and went for a walk round Brixton market. I crossed a road, bought a newspaper and read the front page.

After a quick check to see how I was doing with them - and yes I could read the bottom line of the chart. I was having the odd bit of blurring, but already I could see the improvement in my depth perception - so I cycled off home. And since then, I've been (mostly) stunned by how good they are.

It's sometimes patchy, and the picture improves (and sometimes gets worse again). My first stint at a screen was horrible. I had multiple images and couldn't get them under control. But I broke off from that, spoke to someone in the room for twenty minutes, and when I looked back the screen was perfectly readable.

I've found my office screen is hard to read for the first twenty minutes of the day in the office - after I've cycled there in cold weather.

Sometimes, after looking at something for a long time and having trouble with it, it springs into focus.

So what is going on? Well, I'm still frustrated by that fact that I have seen no proper explanation how this works, but I'm guessing it might be something like this. Suppose the varifocals do indeed create multiple images in each eye, and then the two eyes work together to choose the best one?

That's a new way of working (and one that is completely different from the way normal degree-level optics pictures images forming on the retina). That would explain the way my eyes sometimes cope, and sometimes seem to go backwards.

My right eye is still the strongest - and with its tiny pupil has a nice depth of field. So in many situations, I can still try and do things in the monocular way. The sudden blurring is when the information from the left eye starts to look useful, and my brain has to work to put it together.

So the first day I had the lenses, when I sat at my screen, I was so used to working in a monocular way, that I automatically tried it again, and was confused by the multiple images in my right eye. Looking round the room, and talking to someone got me back into using both eyes again, and that helped when I went back to the screen.

I've found night vision is much better from the start, and I see further in the distance, right form the first.

Does that explain it?

That seems to explain some of it. By this explanation, I should find that the first few days are a process of acclimatisation, and I get more used to the lenses thereafter. Certainly, I've noticed that I settle into the lenses much quicker in the mornings now than I did in the first few days.

I've tried looking at things with one eye, too, to see if I can see the sort of multiple-focus images I'm talking about, and I'm not too sure I can. I certainly see better when I use both eyes - and I'm less monocular than in the past, but I'm leaning heavily on my right eye.

So I've tried things my optician says would be wrong: one day, after a week of the varifocals, I put a pair of the old lenses in, thinking I might find the old way hard to do after I'd got used to the varifocals.

In fact, the monocular vision struck me as easy, and very clear, and in some ways a relief. There was no effort to keep the screen in focus, I was just using my right eye. However, I didn't have such good depth of field, at all.

After a couple of hours, I switched to the varifocals, and again was surprised by how easy the transition was. I just went back to the screen and moved around the house as before.

I did have another bad time acclimatising to the screen - but that was the next day, after a whole day wearing the varifocals.

I've also noticed a couple of other things. Driving on a sunny day, I realised my left eye was closed - it dazzles easily - but the right eye, with its varifocal lens, was making out just fine. It seems that with practice I don't actually need to use both eyes to get benefit from the lenses.

Later that day, I focussed a telescope on the moon, and saw a lot of detail in the craters. Again, that was with one eye at a time. I realise now that I only used my right eye. It's a reflex as it's been my best eye, but I should have had a go to see how the left eye did!

Conclusions

My ideas about how this works don't really stand up, and I want to know more, but it seems that people making varifocal contact lenses don't put information on the web about how they work.

I know my prescription is fairly unusual, so I wouldn't expect other people's experience to match, but I'm interested to hear any other thoughts on varifocal lenses.

Flying The Flag

2009-08-21T11:10:00.000-07:00

A couple of months ago, a lamp-post appeared outside our house. But one with nothing on the top.

I asked the guy working on it - he came from Thames Water, and was putting in a smart water-meter to monitor the new water main on our street. the meter is in the plastic bollard next to the pole.

The meter is supposed to signal back to Thames Water HQ any leaks or problems - but we have poor mobile phone signal in my street.

So they put up a tall antenna, using a normal lamp-post stem.

It looked sort of unfinished, so I put a flower-pot on the top sith a hook in it, and now we're flying a flag (it's the Cornish flag).

We'd like to fly different flags - any suggestions or offers?

Raise The Roof Singers, Horniman Museum

2009-04-06T07:55:00.000-07:00

Raise The Roof practices at the Horniman Museum in South London. This is from their public concert, which we stumbled on, on Sunday (5 April 2009).

From the balcony, I couldn't see the choir well, but I had a good view of the energetic leader and conductor, Melanie Harrold, and couldn't resist taking a video.

The video isn't here or on Youtube any more. Melanie got in touch to say that a film of her conducting an invisible choir didn't really get the event across properly.

Comics: Ex Machina, Fables and Promethea....

2009-02-20T16:06:00.000-08:00

I've been reading some comics lately. I have missed so many, and Lambeth Libraries has such a good selection - at Brixton, Streatham and West Norwood at the very least.

So, what's good?

Ex Machina, written by Brian K Vaughn, and drawn by Tony Harris, is very nice.

Like Paul Chadwick did with Concrete, Vaughn leaves the details of where Mitchell Hundred's powers come from a mystery. The main story is the politics, but the super-stuff is central to what happens.

"How would it be if you had that power?" it asks. The answer is, if this particular man could talk to machines, he'd be a rather average superhero, and then a much more interesting mayor of New York - one who says "Up and away" to lifts, and "Jam" to guns.

There is more than a nod to Paul Chadwick - Vaughn names Hundred's friend Bradbury after a science fiction writer, just as Chadwick's Concrete has a friend called Vonnegut. The drawings lose by comparison with Chadwick's style - Harris is determined to be real, making Hundred's outfit lame, and basing everyone on photos (the models get credits in volume 1). I'm three volumes into this, and want more.

Fables is a winning concept: Fairy tale beings live in exile in the Mundane world - mostly, as tends to be the way, in New York.

The good here is the way Bill Willingham plays with the characters. Prince Charming is (as we should have realised) a serial charmer, divorced from Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty and Snow White, but still working his charm. Beauty and the Beast live happily ever after - except he is only human when she loves him, and tends to revert when she's cross. That's not convenient after hundreds of years, when you are living in hiding...

There are at least 11 volumes of this saga apparently (and I only just heard of it!). The two I've read are pretty good.

Finally, Promethea is Alan Moore's take on myth. The other two series are comics for entertainment's sake. This one has ambitions and Moore's mighty writing mojo pulls it off.

Promethea is a story - she's from the realm of story, the Immateria. In our world, she is embodied by writers and artists. Literally embodied. Student Sophie Bangs "becomes" Promethea by writing a poem.

When people say comics are mythic, they are saying what they wish was true. In fact they are normally debased, broken myths. This one is the real thing. Moore plays the metaphors brilliantly, nodding to all the misguided pretension about images and ideas in comics, but doing the only thing that should be done: telling a story.

On one level, Promethea is as fatuously simple as Billy Batson shouting Shazam to invoke Captain Marvel, or Diana Prince turning into Wonder Woman. But in Moore's hands it's way better, with multiple threads of woven with the complexity of his Watchmen, and a contrast between reality and the unreal that owes something to Joss Whedon's Buffy. Characters dance in and out, from fairy tales and comics - to take one example, "celebrity omnipath" the Painted Doll is a better, scarier Joker.

And, magically, by taking this story so very seriously, Moore turns it into something far, far more. In volume two a goddess has sex with a magician. For a whole chapter (a whole issue of the original comic series). Before our very eyes. For me, that is a high point in comics - and fairly unusual in any sort of literature. What follows reminds me of the psychedelic comics Marvel tried to do for the whole of the 1970s (Steve Gerber and Jim Starlin, from memory), only done right.

Watchmen is a great comic from more than 20 years ago. It may also be a worthwhile movie (but Alan Moore doesn't want his name on it). Now's a good moment to see what else Alan Moore has done since. We're amphibious creatures, living in the worlds of mind and body, he says. In Promethea (up to ten years old), we're swimming in the deep end.

What are my friends like?

2009-02-06T23:13:00.000-08:00

A bit stereotyped from the look of this...

I won't be at MWC

2009-01-27T08:31:00.000-08:00

I'm starting full time on eWeek Europe, there's a soft launch happening, and it's half term. Have a lovely time, everyone who is in Barcelona for MWC09. I just cancelled my hostel booking.

A water rail in Brockwell Park

2009-01-27T03:03:00.000-08:00

How rural was this? I needed to read Lark Rise to Candleford. Why? Well the series is delicious, and I love to drool over the hats and late Victorian ladies. But there is actually more to Candleford. The book is a living breathing social history. Every so often a spark of the real thing livens up the TV series, but the mother lode is essential reading - or so I've been told many times.

Lambeth Libraries has a copy, and it's in the Carnegie Library. Like so many of Lambeth's libraries, this is a beautiful Grade II building, built with late 19th century charity, generosity and style. It has a calm light atmosphere and a reading garden out the back.

On my way home through Brockwell Park, our local bird watcher is transfixed, peering with her binoculars at the lower frozen pond. "It's a water rail," she says. "You won't see one in London again." She shows me a picture on her camera and I wait.

Soon enough, a dainty little bird (like a moorhen but more sophisticated looking) emerges and shily potters about, pecking seeds from the ice.

Back home after that, to enjoy the rural rememberances in the book.

Recipe: Slacker Chicken Soup

2008-12-08T07:58:00.001-08:00

I don't really do recipes, but I often make this very easy soup on a Monday morning, the day after we've had a roast chicken meal. It's thick, juicy and spicy.

Ingredients:
- remains of a roast chicken
- a large onion
- two large potatoes
- frozen sweetcorn
- cumin, ginger, chilli powder, pepper and salt

Dismantle the chicken. Tip the juice from the chicken's roasting dish into a pot, take all the remaining meat off the chicken, and boil the bones and skin in a couple of pints of water.

This is the one bit where it pays not to be lazy. The meat comes off best when it's still warm, so do it right after the meal, before you wash up. Put a bay leaf in the pan if you've got one, put a lid on the saucepan, shut the kitchen door and simmer for maybe an hour. don't overdo it or the whole house will smell of chicken stock.

Leave the chicken meat and the pot of juice in the fridge. Drain the stock through a seive and bin the bones. Do this before you go to bed, if you remember. Again, it works best while the stock is warm, otherwise it sets and seiving it is messy.

Next day, you have all the components of a soup. They are on the counter next to the cooker in the photo.

The juice you poured off has turned into jelly, with fat on top. Free range chickens have better jelly and a lot less fat. Chop the onion up small, and sweat it in some of this fat.

Scoop off the rest of the fat, and save it for other jobs. I'm told chicken fat makes a good skin moisturiser, but I think it smells a bit odd for that.

While the onion is starting to cook, chop up the potatoes into little cubes. Add them to the saucepan, and when they have cooked a bit, add spice. I use a teaspoon of cumin, half a teaspoon of ginger, and a quarter of a teaspoon of chili. Use more, or less, as you like.

Then add the chicken. Chop it up into smallish bits. I save the best bits of chicken for people in the family who don't like soup, to have in sandwiches.

Pour the stock in, and add the jelly. Turn the gas up till it boils, then turn down, and simmer. You've now got enough time to do today's washing up, have a coffee and put a loaf in the bread-machine.

When the potatoes are cooked, turn the gas off and pour in a good big handful of frozen sweet corn. The hot soup will thaw it out, and it won't overcook when you heat the soup up later. Add pepper and salt as needed.

Playing (Jenga) with my food

2008-12-08T04:33:00.000-08:00

After three days in China, my chopstick skills were good enough to take part in a game of Turnip Jenga.

It came to the table in a stack that was so suggestive of the game, it was the only thing we could do, really.

The big rubber band ball

2008-09-20T05:13:00.000-07:00

It's approaching 4lb in weight, and contains more than 4000 ordinary post office rubber bands.

We've been collecting for a few weeks, including some donated by a postman (yes, even above the ones they drop, they gather some up and re-use them) and some from Freecycle (thanks Krissy, Sara Jane, Barbara and anyone else).

This is an obviously pointless exercise. It's not even heroically pointless, as there are bigger and more destructive rubber band balls out there. '

But I believe that bending down to pick them up is good exercise, and twanging them on the ball keeps the fingers supple. I'm moderately interested to see how many bands can be got on one ball, before it's too large to stretch them on. It's already taken more bands than I would have expected, and we've reached a stage where it takes a lot of thinly stretched bands to increase the dimensions of the ball even slightly.

Some people are outraged at the number of these bands dropped on the streets - particularly since the Post Office changed to red ones, supposedly to help the posties see them and pick them up, but actually making the number more obvious.

I can't muster outrage. In my sad little way, I'm enjoying picking them, and the feeling of weight and energy in the ball. I'm toying with the idea of getting more creative: why not make rubber people, or rubber octopi, or rubber dogs to befriend the postmen?

The Post Office won't discuss how much it spends on them, but two years ago owned up to buying 342 million a year, and "re-using the vast majority".

The Post Office has also suggested that the bands might be bio-degradable, which is a pointless thought. The bands are organic, so I guess they must eventually decompose, but I can't see it happening very quickly. And would it help? Dog droppings and chewing gum are also biodegradable, but we don't like to have them biodegrading on the pavement.

There are also a couple of older pictures here (though none of these are as old as my faulty camera date suggests). And a cat for scale...

(the date on the camera has gone wrong BTW)

Summer Holiday

2008-09-20T05:05:00.000-07:00

It was a bit blowy in Mullion this August, but we enjoyed it.

For anyone still looking at this blog, I'm not putting much here. I get paid to blog on open source at ZDNet, and on wireless at Techworld.

I'm also putting stuff on the London Pride blog.

An Angel shook my hand...

2008-06-29T14:35:00.000-07:00

This chap grabbed me by the hand, near Tower Bridge last week.

I was in Morris gear, bells and ribbons and all, waiting by the pier for some people I was supposed to be dancing with. I had to walk past a film crew who were setting up their lights, mics and so forth - and as I walked past, this guy beamed at me and said "Hey, you're a Morris dancer!" and shook me by the hand.

Afterwards I thought - he was the only one in a suit, he must be an actor. I asked the crew what was filming, and they said Bones.

Any one of my Buffy-crazed family would have recognised him instantly as David Boreanaz (or Angel), and I'm pretty embarassed not to have recognised him myslf.

Still, at least they way it went I didn't make a fool of myself. Apart from the whole Morris dancer thing, of course.

And I'm pleased to say he's a charming man who spontaneously talks to eccentric British people. And no, he didn't seem the least bit worried by the wooden stick I was carrying...

My first-class cricketing namesake

2008-05-06T01:33:00.000-07:00

How have I been unaware that among the handful of Peter Judges in the world., there has been one with a career in first-class cricket? Born in Cricklewood in 1916, he played for Middlesex, and recorded the fastest "pair" in cricketing history. This means, according to Wikipedia, he was dismissed by two consecutive balls in the space of a minute, against a visiting Indian team in 1946.

I was looking myself up in Wikipedia, because PR man Andrew Smith mentioned a couple of other journalists' Wikipedia entries in a post about researching journalist backgrounders.

I don't have a Wikipedia entry, and really, I don't think I have any achievements worthy to stand against my illustrious namesake. And I hope all PR profiles of me mention the highly-relevant fact that someone with my name - along with plenty of better cricketing performances - once got two ducks in a minute.

That was cold!

2008-01-03T08:10:00.001-08:00

The Saturday before Christmas, I went for a swim in the Brockwell Lido. I think that makes me officially, one of the Brockwell Icicles.

It was cold. Expect more of this in 2008 - I just joined the Outdoor Swimming Society.

Image by James Purssell

Best ever local paper headline?

2008-01-03T06:01:00.001-08:00

I saw this placard for the Helston Packet, in Mullion.

I think it's the "20 MPH" that turns it from a good local paper headline into a great one.

Other places people break 60 MPH or 30 MPH limits. Only in Cornwall is it news when they break a 20 MPH limit. And not just news, but headline, out-on-a-placard-on-the-street news.

In London, things are faster and more dangerous. The best I've seen here is "POLICE PIG BITES BOY"

Sorry for the poor angle on the photo. I was carrying presents from the car, and couldn't crouch to get it lined up better....

Happy New Year to you all, anyway!

And now - a physical impossibility?

2007-11-15T02:46:00.000-08:00

It's a week for strange science. For two years I've been following a company which claims its radio system can deliver information faster than the physical limits described by the Shannon-Hartley theorem. This is stranger than D-Wave's quantum claims, since what it's claiming is a physical impossibility by existing science.

The company also has a much higher valuation: its share price puts the company's worth at more than a billion dollars. And it still hasn't shared its technology, or delivered a service. This month, phones using the technology will apparently start trials in Florida, and in advance of that, a financial company has given it a glowing assessment.

I think the comments following on from Techworld blog on the subject tell you what you need to know about this one.

Quantum computing - keep waiting

2007-11-13T06:31:00.000-08:00

D-Wave, the quantum computing company I wrote about in February, is back, this time with a Google scientist in tow.

They've got Google's image-search expert, Dr Hartmut Neven, showing an algorithm on their new quantum computer, at SC07, a supercomputing show in Nevada. I've written it up for ZDnet and the Guardian.

But unfortunately, the quantum computing research establishment is even more sceptical this go round. "The interest of D-Wave for me is mainly one of psychology, business and the margins of science," professor Andrew Steane, of the centre for quantum computation at the University of Oxford, told me. "My conclusion is that I suspect they are misleading themselves."

While people like me still understand the original naive view of quantum computing (millions of computers in parallel universes), real researchers who have now spent twenty years trying to produce more qubits and keep them isolated from the world for longer have moved onto subtler considerations.

I have a suspicion that "proper" quantum computing may be impossible for somewhat similar reasons to perpetual motion. We can see a theoretical possibility that we might exclude interactions with the outside world long enough to keep the qubits coherent, but there's an eventual interaction with the outside world which, like friction in a proposed perpetual motion machine, imposes a limit which might turn out to be not as far beyond conventional computers as we had hoped.

Real quantum researchers say there is a distinction to be made between an "experiment" and a "computer". A computer takes an understood process, to work out new results. In an experiment, the results themselves don't signify anything except the extent to which they confirm or deny the theories behind the experiment.

My feeling is that quantum computing experiments may not in the end produce vastly more powerful computers, but they will push forward our understanding of the nature of reality.

A step forwards for NetEvents!

2007-09-27T00:06:00.000-07:00

I'm at NetEvents, the network industry press gathering. It's in Malta this year, and as you'd expect, the hotel is nice.

But that's not what you want to hear about. I'm in the conference room now, hearing about the networks that support the CERN particle accelerators.

I'm telling you about something else. For the first time in my ten years of NetEvents, we have Power to the Conference Tables!

At the start 0f every NetEvents, we all scour the hall for signs of a power socket we can use.

This time I spotted cables taped to the floor.

And sure enough, we all have (UK!) power sockets under our tables.

There's an irony though, We're all using Wi-Fi laptops. on a LAN provided by Trapeze Networks.

So the wires are actually a by-product of the growth ofwireless networking.

A Segway angel at the Canal Festival

2007-09-07T16:07:00.000-07:00

I've seen a Segway with a purpose, five years after the much-hyped scooter first appeared.

This angel glided round the Islington Canal Festival - near the Angel, playing harp music and distributing blessings. I later saw him standing on top of a canal boat, lying flat to get under bridges and standing up the other side.

Very well done, and good to see the Segway still trundling along in the realms of eccentric technology.

Visual Spam at the Petrol Pump

2007-07-26T00:55:00.001-07:00

A breathless email from a US PR offers me a depressing opportunity.

"Hi Peter, Gas stations are one of the few places remaining where consumers stand still long enough to actually see advertising - so it better be good."

Yep, he wants me to hear about TV at petrol pumps. And he's really excited.

"Novatel Wireless and the Internet Connectivity Group (ICG) have joined hands to offer gas station owners and advertisers state-of-the-art content management, distribution and display technology for maximum impact at the pump - to the right people, in the right place. Are you interested in learning more about how Novatel and IDG are maximizing advertising ROI [return on investment] for gas station owners?"

In a word, no. It's moving, visual spam.

It's already everywhere. It's on London Buses buses and makes people travel sick.

It's been in Post Offices (but I think they may have given up on this one as it just draws attention to how long the queue is).

picture found at MarketingBlurb.

Heard the one about the wooden PC?

2007-07-23T23:54:00.001-07:00

A supposedly zero carbon PC is being developed by PC World, featuring wood casing for keyboard, screen and mouse. Use of recycled materials and low electricity needs will reduce its carbon footprint to 85 percent of a standard PC.I only mention it here because, ages ago, I heard about a wooden PC. Apparently it "wooden" work!!! Sorry. I'll go now.

read more | digg story

Qualcomm beaten to the patent wall...?

2007-07-23T14:23:00.000-07:00

US mobile phone technology vendor Qualcomm is known for efforts to get the most out of its patents.

It's also very proud to show them all off, displayed on a wall. I saw this wall, on a recent visit to its offices in San Diego.

It's very impressive, but there's something bothering me. I'm sure I saw a similar wall, showing all IBM's patents, at an IBM briefing centre in Austin, some fifteen years ago (I was on a visit to learn about the p series - or the RS6000 as it then was).

I don't have a photo of IBM's wall, and haven't been able to find one online. From memory, even that long ago, it was bigger than Qualcomm's.

But what I'm wondering is - doesn't this mean IBM has prior art on the whole Patent Wall thing....?

Beware Lambeth's Parking Trap!

2007-07-13T00:26:00.000-07:00

Lambeth Council has knowingly left a misleading parking sign on its streets, and is gathering fines from people who have parking there in good faith.

Despite knowing the sign is wrong, the council appears to be ignoring appeals over the bogus parking fines, and has not made any effort to correct the sign, so more people will be suckeered into paying unnecessary fines.

I parked my car near a shop on Effra Road, on a Sunday morning, May 20. I was on a bit of road labelled "Bus Stop", but I was a long way from the stop itself, and right next to a sign that said parking restrictions didn't apply on Sunday, and loading was allowed during the week.

I was a bit surprised. "Bus stops aren't very restrictive," I thought. "Maybe it's OK this end of the bus stop." The sign said I could park, so I parked.

A couple of weeks later, I got a Penalty Charge Notice, based on a CCTV photo of my car in the bus stop. A traffic warden would have seen that the spot was mis-labelled, and wouldn't have issued the fine, I thought.

I went back to Effra Road, and saw that the sign was still there. I took the photos you see here, and sent in an appeal.

Yesterday, I got a letter from an un-named Parking Investigations Officer, at Lambeth Parking Services.

The letter makes no reference to my complaint. It lists seven grounds for appeal, but doesn't mention the possibility that Lambeth Parking might have got its signs wrong.

It takes a somewhat bullying tone, warning that I can still get away with a £50 fine, but if I appeal again and lose, I'll have to pay £100 - or more. "If your formal representations are rejected, we will send you an Appeals form so that you can make an appeal to the Independent Adjudicator. The Adjudicator's decision is binding and he or she can order the payment of costs against either the Local Authority or the regitered keeper if either party has been particularly unreasonable.

As far as I know the sign is still there. I think it may be an old sign that was left have been left there when the bus stop was extended.

Lambeth knows the sign is wrong. Since my appeal went in, it has been covered with black plastic, but this has now weathered away, so the sign is once more luring people to park in a place where Lambeth spy-camera operators can fine them.

I wonder if the sign is being left there deliberately?

eBay on the philosophical edge

2007-05-22T00:07:00.000-07:00

Rating a transacion on eBay, and I'm not sure they are right here. How can an item description be "neither inaccurate or accurate"? Is there another option? Never mind - on with the show.

How accurate was the item description?

Neither inaccurate nor accurate

Dawkins Book Accidentally Proves God's Existence*

2007-05-14T12:43:00.000-07:00

(*I probably should point out that that is supposed to be a joke).

I ordered The God Delusion from Amazon Marketplace, where it turns out to be very cheap. Later that day, my friend said he wanted a copy, and had just been let down by someone who said he'd get one for him.

The next day, two copies arrived from the Amazon trader. How do you explain a coincidence like that? It proves there must be some kind of providence, surely!

But wait a minute, if I now get away without paying for the second copy, it proves there is no justice in the Universe and God doesn't exist.

Unless God is doing it as a double bluff (which, as we all know, ends up with him disappearing in a puff of logic).

Anyway, sent by God or not, this book is irritating. There's good stuff here, but Dawkins is, well a bit bumptious. He's so sure of himself, you begin to wonder whose God Delusion he's talking about. Which is strange. In the Blind Watchmaker and his other science books, on his home territory, you're faced with his awe and wonder. He wants to know more, and he's keen to explore.

When he steps into someone else's world, he's just not interested to know or see more than what he considers obvious.

"Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology," says Terry Eagleton in his review (I found it through Wikipedia).

Dawkins lays out the most obvious reasons we know the stories of the Virgin Birth must have been invented later. Well, yes. Father Christmas wasn't there either.

Meanwhile, in the real world of scholarship, you have John Dominic Crossan. With my limited reading, he's a very random example, but his Jesus: a Revolutionary Biography got plaudits from senior Catholics and goes much further. "How many years was Easter Sunday?" asks Crossan. How long did it take after Jesus' death for the resurrection narrative to emerge? Crossan is far too sophisticated to say the stories were made up, but he's not talking of a literal resurrection.

What Dawkins says from the outside, falls well short of things that are being said on the inside - at least of the kind of church I'd have anything to do with.

There are fundamentalists out there ignoring the facts, and they are easy targets for him. And there are way too many liberals not standing up for the facts as we can know them. Dawkins has a lot of common ground with liberals - and uses it to good effect when he joins with the former Bishop of Oxford to campaign against a school which is teaching creationism in this country.

But liberals almost irritate him more than the evangelicals. They're scarcely recognisable as Christians at all, he says.

So instead of really engaging with any of them, he steps back into his comfort zone, quoting people he likes, and who he agrees with (they are always "devastating", or "penetrating" because they agree with him), and going off on lengthy footnotes that are supposed to amuse us into liking him. And the whole thing is wrapped up with back-slapping quotes on the jacket from Derren Brown and Brian Eno who are experts on, what exactly?

My veins fail the upgrade to Club Class Blood Donation

2007-04-23T03:57:00.000-07:00

Last week I was invited to give platelets instead of normal blood.

In the world of blood donation, this is an upgrade to Club Class. Instead of lying on a temporary couch in Brixton Town Hall, platelet donation means sitting in a high-tech chair watching TV in Tooting.

Platelets are the blood cells that handle clotting. If you've got good blood, you have plenty to spare, and if you haven't got enough, you are in danger of bleeding to death. People who aren't making enough platelets need them, including some premature babies and people having chemotherapy.

Extracting them is more complex than normal blood donation - they take the blood out of your vein, extract the platelets, and put the rest back in - a bit like the dialysis that kidney patients have.

It takes an hour and a half or so, during which time you sit tight, plugged into the machine, in the kind of Club Class airline seat people like me can only dream of. With plenty of leg room, too - with smiling people bringing you snacks.

The donation centre is a pleasant bike ride for me, across Tooting Common.

I was looking forward to this. But my veins let me down.

Club Class blood doners get slightly bigger needles stuck in them apparently (though I couldn't see the difference) - and my veins proved big but unwilling to co-operate with this sort of treatment. We got three samples out of one arm, and none out of the other.

It's a shame, really - apart from my awkward veins, the experience was very pleasant, and I'd recommend it to anyone else.

The only other drawback is that, unlike other Club Class activities, when you come down you're still in Tooting.

Kurt is up in heaven now

2007-04-12T08:13:00.000-07:00

One of the best stories from Kurt Vonnegut, who died today aged 84, is this, from A Man Without a Country:

"I am, incidentally, Honorary President of the American Humanist Association, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that totally functionless capacity. We had a memorial service for Isaac a few years back, and I spoke and said at one point, "Isaac is up in heaven now." It was the funniest thing I could have said to an audience of humanists. I rolled them in the aisles. It was several minutes before order could be restored. And if I should ever die, God forbid, I hope you will say, "Kurt is up in heaven now." That's my favorite joke."

Yes, he's up there, sharing a beer with Isaac.

I like this photo, from the Washington Post, via an Australian newspaper and blog.

Corporate Anthem for Spooks

2007-04-04T05:50:00.000-07:00

Can you believe the National Reconnaissance Office, which runs America's spy satellites, has a <corporate anthem?

It's got everything, including corny soft rock, stirring voice overs and very unusual official pictures of secret satellites....

Online frustrations: renting a room

2007-03-08T15:04:00.000-08:00

After yesterday's praise for Freecycle, here's another good online community - though I have to say it's not quite working for me - EasyRoomMate.

Finding a lodger, or a room, is exactly the kind of thing that is perfect for an online site. Post your advert up, search the other adverts, and it should be pretty easy to find the going rate, and find a lodger.

The house-share sites have got sophisticated. They have tiered membership, so it's free to post an advert, but you can contact other people more easily, if you pay a small fee. EasyRoomMate makes it really clear: Basic members can only Premium members, Premium members can only contact Basic members.

They also take a lot of information (and I do trust them to take care of it!) , so it should be easy to find a match.

But it's not working well for us. We've posted an ad for the room shown here, upgraded to Permium, and contacted 160 possible housemates in the last month. We've had rejections from 16, and silence form the others.

I think we're outside their magic profile. the site is aimed at 20-30 something single professionals. The fields on the form are aimed at them, and other people don't quite fit in.

When we contact people, they can see on our profile that we are straight, they know we don't smoke, and they know we have pets. The profile doesn't tell them the single most striking factor about our house - three children - because there's nowhere on the form to mention it.

We put that up front in the advert, but it would save a lot of wastage if we could tell at a glance if someone will consider living with a family.

The Elves that came from FreeCycle

2007-03-07T08:42:00.000-08:00

I like Freecycle. It's an online community to share unwanted stuff. Clear out your junk by offering it to other people. Check the list to see if someone else is offering something you want. It's got enough of a critical mass, that there's now a chapter for the borough of Lambeth, with about 250 postings a week.

I've had a coffee table and a bed from Freecycle, and I've passed on lots of computer bits, a desk and a greenhouse. On Monday, I got four volumes of a fantasy comic that was hugely popular in the 1980s. Elfquest is in the style of Tolkien - or closer to Andre Norton - and comic fans used to rave about it.

It's coming up fresh 25 years on. It's a big hit with Kitty, who's reading through it as fast as ever she can, with excited reports on the characters' doings: "Cutter and Leeta have children!"

Quantum computing - Breakthrough AND sham??

2007-02-19T04:32:00.000-08:00

I've been writing about quantum computing in The Guardian and Techworld. I also did a phone interview for Ireland's RTE radio.

There is one company in the world - D-Wave - that has persuaded venture capitalists to put money behind the idea that quantum computers (which to put it crudely, could perform billions of calculations in parallel universes) are one day going to be a commercial reality.
And last week D-Wave performaned a demonstration, in its labs, and transmitted it to two other sites.

Ars Technica makes the point that D-Wave, like Schrodinger's cat and the "qubits" in a quantum computer, is now in two states superposed. No-one got their hands on the device, so we still don't know if it was a breakthrough or an optimistic case of smoke and mirrors.

We do know that the 16 qubits had a limited flexibility owing to their topology (each is connected to a maximum of eight others, instead of every other qubit). We also know that D-Wave is not claiming this computer beats anything that can be done by a quite ordinary PC.

And Ars Technica suspects (as do we all) that the demonstration was aimed at shareholders they would eventually get a return for their money.

Desperados - the best thing on TV

2007-02-07T10:32:00.000-08:00

This kids' programme, Desperados is excellent. It's got a good story line, good acting and nice dialogue. One white kid who broke his spine doesn't want to join the wheelchair basketball team, a black kid wants nothing else - but his mum wants him to do his homework. And the team coach - paralympic wheelchair basketball player, Ade Adepitan, is desperate for players because: "Rear seat belts have ruined the talent pool."

Quantum Computing at Home

2007-02-03T00:47:00.000-08:00

I've just been looking at quantum computing for an article, and Kitty has just got two kittens.

At least she say's she's got two, but one of them's shy. Whenever I go into the room, I only see one.
Could it be that she actually has one Schrodinger kitten, she can see both wave functions, and I only see the one?

The longest ever email disclaimer ?

2007-01-16T10:14:00.000-08:00

Nortel Wins Role in BT’s 21 Century Network, said a press release I just had from Nortel. The release was 561 words long; the email it was attached to was 193 words long.

At the end of the release was an 1100-word disclaimer which started out "Certain statements in this press release may contain words such as “could”, “expects”, “may”, “anticipates”, “believes”, “intends”, “estimates”, ”targets”, “envisions”, “seeks” and other similar language... ". It included (unless I missed a full-stop somewhere) one incredible 870 word sentence, starting "Further, actual results or events could differ materially from those contemplated in forward-looking statements..." and ends "...or the share consolidation resulting in a lower total market capitalization or adverse effect on the liquidity of Nortel’s common shares. "

You can see the disclaimer in all its glory (in very small type) on the press release at Nortel's site.

The release came from a PR company called Pleon. I'm sure the Pleon peons are consummate professionals, sending this guff out through gritted teeth - but it's fitting that "pleon" means "more" and gives us the word pleonasm meaning "the use of more words than necessary to express an idea clearly".

As Pleon's own slogan puts it - so much more succinctly - this kind of thing is "Beyond Communications"

More IT Anthems -- RockDotRock from Symantec

2007-01-05T09:39:00.000-08:00

How about that? Mere days after I revive IT Anthems at ZDNet, a new corporate rock legend is born.

RockDotRock is a band sponsored by Internet security company Symantec. The songs are exactly the corporate speak you'd expect - anthems to Two-Factor Authentication.

Has to be heard to be believed.

IT Anthems revived

2007-01-02T04:26:00.000-08:00

Yes folks, those corporate songs are back!

I've reconstructed the URLs, and here's a list.

- The earnest harmonies of Honeywell
- The upbeat Ahhh Fujitsu.
- Gibo Groep
- OpenBSD
- Unbelievable... The Power of Sun
- The Free Software Song
- Pass: Ride On
- Worse than a virus outbreak: Checkpoint: We secure the Internet
- Asera rocks the world
- Apple's Greatest Hits
- nVidia, take the world by Soundstorm
- 1-2-3-4-element 5 unplugged
- Sensormatic: I told you we can fly
- I believe in Teradata
- Mindtree: Imagination, Action, Joy!
- Texas Instruments: Fast Forward
- Ericsson WAP rap - in a word, claptrap.
- The industy-defining Ever Onward IBM
- Unisys: We eat, sleep and drink this stuff
- KPMG: the Power of One
- 1-2-3-4 element 5
- Come on board with Blackberry
- Computas - share your knowledge
- A whole bunch of songs in the Hewlett-Packard Roundup
- Corporate Gospel in Ernst&Young Happy Day
- The touching melody of Philips was my first love
- Watch out Sister Sledge - We're AT&T!
- And the hit that started it all: KPMG - our vision of global strategy

ZDNet's blogs are working for me now too - so there's a blog of all this over here.

My achievements: Penguin Whist

2007-01-01T00:33:00.000-08:00

At this time of year, one takes stock of what one has achieved in life. In my case, that's usually fairly depressing. Achievements? Well, none I can think of.

But this year. I've been reminded of a card game I invented 25 years ago. It's called Penguin Whist. My family played it a lot.

Penguin Whist is a variation of Whist - but played with the cards facing outwards.

In fact, Penguin Whist is s a variation of a kind of whist called Silly Whist. Wikipedia describes Silly Whist as a version of Oh Hell, but says the British call it Crazy Whist. In Silly Whist, we used to start with a hand of seven cards, decreasing each hand by one card. We all took turns to bid, and scored a ten point bonus if we made our bid.

Then we thought, being able to see your cards makes it too easy. Penguin Whist starts from one card each and builds up, one card at a time. But it is played with the cards facing out. You can see everyone's cards except your own.

When you have more than two cards you have to sort your neighbour's cards into suits (pick up the hand you're dealt, sort it and pass it on). After a card is led, the other players tell you which cards you can play, in order to follow suit. It's random. It's stupid. But occasionally, with a flash of brilliance, you realise what card to play.

I always lose. My daughter Hannah turns out to be nearly unbeatable.

Actually, if I'm honest, it might have been my brother who thought of it....

I may need to think of another achievement.

Web 2.0 - should we wait for 3.0?

2006-12-14T03:49:00.000-08:00

I really do want Web 2.0 to work. And I want it to work for people like me as well as the A, B and C-list bloggers and inventor-superstars.

I also want ZDNet UK to lead the way. I like them, I used to work there, and they still toss me freelance work from time to time. Their Web 2.0 makeover has all the elements it should to and ought to be really work if anything does.

But that site underlines the still-beta aspect of all this. Check my status: I've got a broken blog that won't let me post. I never send messages, I never get messages, and I've not taken part in any discussion.

And I'm still number 61 in their top 100 members.

Well, I suppose I can say that makes me a sizeable carp in that particular canal.

Save the Theatre Museum!

2006-12-07T04:27:00.000-08:00

I can't believe they're going to close the Theatre Museum in London. It's right in Covent Garden, and it's one of the most fun museums I've ever been to.

Here's a photo from a visit some years ago, when Kitty and Hannah were obviously a bit smaller than they are now.

If you haven't been, go there. Soon. And sign the petition to save it.

It really is a fantastic place. There are interactive exhibits for children, workshop sessions on costume and make-up and the like, and a lot of really serious good archive material on the history of the London Theatre.

Corporate Anthems update

2006-11-09T04:06:00.000-08:00

Never mind ZDNet, YouTube is where the corporate anthems action is now.

There's We Built This Starbucks, and Messe Dusseldorf.

And - they have the IBM Marching Song!

The return of IT Anthems?

2006-11-09T03:13:00.000-08:00

Everyone is very excited about the relaunch of ZDNet UK, in "Web 2.0" Social mode. It's a major revamp, sort of a cross between LinkedIn and MySpace for geeks.

Tons of content has pulled through the filter into the new site, but there was only one question I wanted to know. Would it still have IT Anthems, the fabled web craze of 2002.

To my surprise, those classic cringemaking company hits are still there. The only Anthems page that shows up on ZDNet's search is the abysmal Apple page, including Apple is Baking Fruit and Apple II Forever.

However, Google search the site, and the others crawl out of the woodwork.

Here's the earnest harmonies of Honeywell and the upbeat Ahhh fujitsu.

Outside ZDNet, I see interest in Anthems has not died out. There's an academic paper from 2003 on the subject, from a Martin Corbett of the University of Warwick - partly researched from our site from the look of it.

And here's one I missed. Apparently, in 2004, a corporate anthem broke through into the "real" pop charts in Japan. It helped that the lyrics "We wil destroy houses! We will destroy bridge!" describe the work of a demolition company.

That one I want to hear.

History Matters - the nation blogs

2006-10-29T13:49:00.000-08:00

I just put this into the History Matters blog. They want to know what everyone was doing on 17 October. What they did for work, for play, and what they were reading. You've got two days to put your own diary in...

In the 1840s, the saxophone was invented. So was the concertina. Both have had a varied history since then, but have had little to do with each other.

I could claim to have brought them together at Ronnie Scott's jazz club in London on 17 October, but I'd be lying.

The truth is that, as midnight struck, I was at the cloakroom, checking in a concertina I can't actually play, before hearing a performance by saxophonist Branford Marsalis - who certainly can play. I had the concertina for a Morris dance practice earlier on.

After the show I cycled home, past Trafalgar Squre and the Houses of Parliament, to Brixton. I read a little - a Patrick O Brian novel, about Nelson's Navy - and slept for three hours.

I work as a tech journalist, and on 17 October, I was covering the Smartphone Show at Excel. It was a long cycle ride there, but a nice route - I went through New Cross, past my old school, past the Hawksmoor church and the Cutty Sark at Greenwich, and under the Foot Tunnel. the tunnel is 100 years old, and I used to go through daily to my first ever job in 1977. Cycling is still forbidden, and people still scoot their bikes through it, as if that's not really cycling.

At the conference, the president of Symbian told a lot of press and industry that we are on the verge of a whole new world, that will be brought about by mobile phoens that can do email, web and video conferencing. They'll be more important than the PC he said and will wipe out world hunger (well he more or less said that).

History will no doubt be the judge.

Back home, I had tea with my family. I have three daughters and usually see more of them in a day than I am tonight.

I went to a book group. We'd been reading Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer. None of us were very impressed. I think the book is over-rated because of its role in reversing censorship. As history, as a landmark, it's interesting, as writing it's interesting, but dated. There are plenty of better books out there.

The group consists of seven men, all with children, and all living within a mile of each other. We've been meeting for two years. We don't go very deeply into the books; we drink wine and talk.

Robot book is painful to read

2006-10-28T06:00:00.000-07:00

We've all had the experience of reading a book someone has recommended - and hating it. It's still a surprise to plough through a book the Guardian describes as "A classic novel.. it reeks simultaneously of Candide, Player Piano and The Wizard of Oz", and find it unreadable.

There are spoilers here, but I wouldn't recommend the book to anyone, so don't worry. Roderick by John Sladek, is painfully hip, in a sort of 1970s way. This means it's full of throwaway remarks and Big Ideas, all referred to rather than explored, and overlaying and strangling an episodic story where nothing much actually happens.

Roderick himself doesn't even appear for the first hundred pages or so, because Sladek is too busy painting a tedious and un-funny picture of all the ins-and-outs of a small university, with pointless subplots about the Shah of Ruritania (he's rich, and doesn't understand Western ways! Ha ha!) and a bad poet and a poor student (he reads Lord of the Rings instead of Ring Lardner! Ho ho!)

When the story properly starts, I'm ready for the profound ideas. And sure enough, it's full of references to other people's thoughts on artificial intelligence. Name checks, that is, for the titles of books, or quick asides about golem myths. To be fair, Sladek has clearly done his homework. He works in so many, I never want to hear another one.

While that's going on, we get more of Sladek's ideas of what would be funny. And we get them all over again, because as we all know a joke is even funnier if you repeat it.

There's s a priest who's too busy running the school sports to do his job. Whenever he appears he's ordered another set of sports kit, with another amusing misprint. There's a doctor who's too busy playing golf and developing property. Every time he appears, he amusingly gets the name of his patients' medication wrong. How hilarious.

Roderick's step-parents seem like they're going to be intersting, but like every other character in this book, they turn into completely contrived cyphers for punning jokes, and unlikely plot developments. They turn out not to be what they appear - but who cares?

I've made it to the end of the first of the books paired here - partly because I remember laughing out loud at The Muller-Fokker Effect as a teenager. I don't think I'll last through the second part, Roderick at Random.

Luckily, it's a library book. Unluckily, it's fallen apart. A previous reader must have found it as hard going as I did, and got stuck. I can't see any other reason why the book should fall open - and apart - at page 54.

Broadband crisis over

2006-10-28T05:43:00.000-07:00

As predicted, my broadband is now seriously boring. For the last two weeks,my download speed has hovered around 6M, and uploads around 400k (speed measured at ADSL Guide).

I've retired TalkTalk's SpeedTouch as my router only needed a bit of time to get used to the new provision. I've needed to reboot it about once a week, which is irritating by no big hassle. ut I hope they improve on it though.

The phone service is working all right -- except for one day when the 1471 feature packed up. I also now have two VoIP phone lines permanently available.

If I was thinking of going to TalkTalk now, I probably wouldn't (unless I was on an exchange which had definitely been unbundled some time ago) but I'm staying put now it's here - unless something awful happens.

That's all.

TalkTalk - the boring phase begins

2006-10-12T03:20:00.000-07:00

After yesterday's excitement, it looks like I'm going to be setting down to routing broadband niggles like the rest of the world.

Yesterday, broadband seemed to be available at a nominal 8 Mbit/s but slower real speeds of course. I checked the speed at ADSL Guide and apparently had 120k (for comparison, the GPRS phone connection I've been using for the last fortnight gives me 33k at the same site).

Then the connection went, Then it came back And so on. All very normal for day one of an unbundled service. When it went off for a lengthy period, I phoned TalkTalk, and discovered the problems everyone else knows - I've had to go back a generation.

TalkTalk won't do a lot of support unless you use their equipment - a USB-connected
Alcatel/Thomson SpeedTouch. This is the old-fashioned frog, used by BT for a long while, in a new casing. It takes broadband and makes it look like fast dial-up, and won't do all the things I've been taking
for granted like sharing the Internet round the house.

I'm up for trying anything new (old), and it does seem unfair to expect them to help with unfamiliar equipment over the phone (even if it's a lovely Fritz box, with good diagnostics, that's been working happily for months). So I've installed the USB modem and - lo and behold! - I'm getting 2.9 Mbit/s over it.

My support guy tells me it's possibly due to attentuation in the house - the SpeedTouch may be less fussy and work with a weaker signal than the Fritz. I'm not sure, but that means the next thing to do is try the Fritz in the master socket...

I'm back online

2006-10-11T09:36:00.000-07:00

I've been at ZDNet today working, among other things, on ZDNet's and Techworld's coverage of today's TalkTalk news.

I saw a post from one user, saying: "Today after three months hell, I'm cancelling my contract with TalkTalk and going back to AOL". Won't he be surprised, eh readers?

Anyway, I just had a call from home, and then some IMs. Seems like the service is back up again.

Apparently we even got a courtesy call from a TalkTalk engineer: "I'm standing right next to a BT engineer, and we wanted to make sure it works before he goes home." I wonder if that was in the exchange? I thought no-one but BT OpenReach could set foot there.

Finally, as I head for home, I can see just how naive and foolish I am. I'm already wondering what speed I've got!

TalkTalk's LLU failure -- the final nail

2006-10-11T02:56:00.000-07:00

Here's proof that TalkTalk has failed at LLU, from the Guardian:

Dan Gardiner, an analyst at Bridgewell Securities, said while customer
numbers connected by TalkTalk were in-line with expectations, "the most interesting feature of today\'s statement is the admission that only 20,000 of its customers have been migrated onto its unbundled local loop platform so far."

"This is considerably less than our forecast and will have a significant impact on Carphone\'s costs."

That's right. 625,000 signed up. 421,000 are on broadband, so 200,000 are waiting, and costing TalkTalk in callcentre costs and (one expects) eventual cancellations.

Of the 421,000 customers connected, only 20,000 are potentially profitable. The other 400,000 are on BT Wholesale connections. So TalkTalk is buying 400,000 broadband lines from BT, and having to give them away for nothing.

The only way out is to move people to unbundled lines. And it is failing to do so.

Why TalkTalk's troubles will get worse

2006-10-11T01:32:00.000-07:00

Carphone Warehouse has announced results today, including a £70 million loss on its TalkTalk division, which retails BT's broadband while putting its own equipment in phone exchanges to offer "unbundled" services. The company is hoping that the long-term investment in local-loop unbundling (LLU) will eventually offset the loss from buying wholesale broadband form BT, and supporting customers who a.

Carphone thinks LLU will save it from the troubles its broadband offer have created. I don't agree.

Here's one news report:

In all, the group had penciled in a 160 mln stg investment in the broadband business, most of which will be spent on putting its own equipment into BT Group local exchanges.

So far, it has 'unbundled' 370 of these exchanges, and the group said it remains 'well on course' for having a presence in 1,000 exchanges by May next year.

Elsewhere, we hear Carphone Warehouse has "had to pay to use BT services while it waits for its own high-speed internet access into homes to be fitted" (This is Money). So LLU will save the day?

Not as far as I can see. My two weeks speaking to various people within TalkTalk leads me to the conclusion that TalkTalk simply does not have the back-end systems or organisation to manage LLU. The systems and bureaucracy within the company are separated from each other, and cannot talk to each other, which will lead to massive over-spend, since every fault will incur vastly more cost than necessary.

TalkTalk's internal systems are broken up and Balkanised at least as badly as BT's were in the old days of British Telecom. In the old days, British Telecom's telephone faults could sometimes go unfixed for days or weeks, while BT's departments passed the buck amongst themselves. One division would be convinced the fault was in the local loop, while another believed it was in the house. Neither would do anything, because they believe it was someone else's problem.

BT has learned from that problem. TalkTalk is repeating it.

To someone in TalkTalk's Faults department, An LLU problem looks like an unfixable "cease order" that can only be traced to BT. To the LLU department, it looks like one of theirs, but maybe it's to do with the account creation?

These problems are real and so far TalkTalk has "declined to comment" on the above.

I asked the PR agency for comment; instead my request got treated as a nag from someone "playing the journalist card" and al I got yet another illustration of TalkTalk's troubles.

As a journalist, my special treatment extends to someone from TalkTalk, called Sat, actually phoning me (imagine that!). He promised to sort it out.

Two days later, I phoned him back and guess what? Can you guess? "It's an LLU issue, sir." He has a colleague called Jonathan who can deal with that. Two more days, and I haven't heard from Jonathan.

Today is the date when LLU promised me the problem would be fixed -- that was a promise made on Friday by someone called Ken, that Kevin Parkin (or Perkin?) would have it resolved in "72 working hours".

As I say, the story is that TalkTalk's problems extend well beyond its difficulties in delivering IPstream DSL services from BT Wholesale. LLU seems to be beyond its ability.

BT has been slammed for failing to support LLU properly, which can't be making things easier at TalkTalk LLU, but TalkTalk LLU seems to have an impossible position within TalkTalk as a whole.

I believe that Carphone Warehouse is heading for an even bigger broadband loss and an even bigger remedial investment when its LLU troubles become public.

Oh, and if that's not enough, Carphone wants to buy AOL UK, too. That should be aumusing.

BT and TalkTalk play pingpong with my head

2006-10-06T03:10:00.000-07:00

If possible, things are worse today. How much worse? Well imagine holding simultaneously for BT and TalkTalk on two mobile phones. Then speaking to them simultaneously. And being told at the end that your phone will be back on again by next Wednesday. Probably.

I was on the phone for three hours to TalkTalk, alternately on hold and talking to their Faults department. Eventually, they repeated the story that I was cut off because of a "cease order" from BT. This was different from the order that they had through Opal Telecom to unbundle the line, and they couldn't tell me who it came from. I had to phone BT.

I was told, again, that the only way to get service back was to speak to BT. Once again, I reacted with disbelief; my advisor (David, a patient man who admitted he was learning the system and said that my account was the most complex he had seen) went away to get more information. He told me that I would need to start a new contract with BT (that wouldn't start for ten working days) and would then tie me in for three months, before considering changing provider again.

According to his records, it's just that some other provider, not TalkTalk, has requested BT to cease providing my service.

It took a long while to get this clear, but that seemed to be the position of TalkTalk's Faults department. But, I said, I had already tried the BT route yesterday, and ended up at TalkTalk's local loop unbundling (LLU) department, who assured me that it was just a line in the exchange that needed fixing.

So David agreed to transfer me across to TalkTalk's LLU again.

While that's going on, I dialled the BT number, on another phone. I then had TalkTalk's hold music ("We have got to get it together") in one ear on a T-Mobile phone, and BT's (Grieg's Morning) in the other ear, courtesy of O2.

Eventually, someone at BT called Phil answered. This time, he said, oh yes, there WAS a cease order on this line. He couldn't tell me who from. He couldn't see who from. But I just had to say the word, and he could set me up with a brand new line. Like David told me, it would take 10 working days, and I'd have to stay with BT for three months.

By this time, TalkTalk's LLU department has answered the phone, and there's a man called Richard in my left hear, hearing half of my conversation with Phil from BT. "No, sir, don't do it," says Richard. "BT aren't even involved in this."

I tell Phil from BT that he's offering a rather extreme answer (espceially if he can't tell me for sure why I'm cut off). I tell him I'll get back to him, I hang up, and I carry on my talk with Richard from TalkTalk.

He disagrees completely with his colleague David, from TalkTalk's faults department. He says there's no other phone company involved, and all I have to do is wait for his department to sort it out and fix the fault. He can't actually see what the fault is: "sometimes we plug a line into our equipment and its dead on arrival". Someone at the exchange wil be able to make it work, he says.

I ring off. I've had three hours of "We have got to get it together".

While I'm on the phone, the post has come. There's a letter from TalkTalk. It's addressed to me, but it has a different account number, which I've never seen before.

The letter speaks to me as if I am a new customer, and says "In our attempts to connect you to TalkTalk, there's been a small hitch. Unfortunately, BT has advised us that it is not possible to put a TalkTalk connection through on the telephone number we currently hold on our records." It suggests that I've given them a wrong number (no), I've got a new telephone number that isn't in BT's database yet (nope), or I'm a cable customer (no again).

I go back to TAlkTalk's LLU department. I get someone called Ken -- he knows who Richard is. Now, Ken is interested to have two account numbers for me. In fact, that's putting it mildly. He's flipping from screen to screen on his system, seeing things he didn't know were even possible. He calls in a senior colleague, Kevin, who has superior powers.

Keven suddenly realises what's happening. Apparently it's not a fault. It's an admin glitch. My line isn't cut off, but it's not shown as active. It's not disconnected, it's in a "limbo state". Kevin has taken his laptop into his office, Ken tells me. Kevin can fix it.

From Ken's tone, the owrds "laptop" and "office" are enough to make Kevin a superior being - and from my time in open-plan offices, I know what he means.

Ken tells me it will be fixed, and I can call him back if it doesn't come live. And he gives me Kevin's number.

When should I call? Well, it should be live in "72 working hours". That's sometime around Wednesday lunchtime. So on Day 15 of the problem, TalkTalk might fix the administrative error that started the trouble.

That is, if this error really was the cuase of the problem. I'm still not convinced.

The Heart of Local Loop Darkness

2006-10-05T07:30:00.000-07:00

TalkTalk is excelling itself with incompetence and overloading. Call its Faults department and - if you aren't told they're busy so call back later - it takes around 30 minutes to connect you to someone who may know nothing about local loop unbundling and broadband.

Yesterday (my eighth day of no broadband or telephone) was a classic. I was assured that I had been disconnected because of "instructions from BT". I tried to get more of an explanation - as this made no sense according to my understanding of the way local loop unbundling works. BT has indeed switched their service off - the problem is that Carphone Warehouse's subsidiary, TalkTalk's sister company Opal Telecom, should be providing a service but isn't.

"BT made us do it," said the TalkTalk Faults guy, sounding more and more strange and otherworldly. "They don't tell us why, they give us instructions." TalkTalk hears voices, you know.

In the end, after I'd asked for more information once too often, he hung up on me (that's a first for me) leaving me to call the BT number he gave me. Sure enough, BT confirmed that my TalkTalk Faults person had indeed been talking utter rubbish.

Was he just making something up to get rid of me? Or is it just that TalkTalk's back-end systems are poorly designed and overloaded, and I got one of the army of new call-centre staff it's taken on, who simply couldn't make sense of what the system told him?

I've got a recording of the call, which I'll put online when I'm not connecting by GPRS (as I have been for a week now).

Today's call was a little better, though massively longer. I had a total of two hours on hold music, while I took my daughter to school and chatted with another unbundling victim at the school gates. There's clearly serious trouble at the Tulse Hill Exchange (8674 code).

When I got back, still on hold I tried to pick out the tune on the concertina. I'm never going to get good at this, but it's nice to have something to play along to. "We have got to get it togetherm now!"

I checked my email. I'm tying up two mobile phones here, to do voice and data that should be on my landline.

Finally, TalkTalk answered. I spoke to someone who actually understood unbundling, and agreed that what I needed was for TalkTalk to get Opal Telecom to send BT OpenReach (they stil own the exchange and have the keys, basically round to fix the problem. I'm priority one, apparently, because I've got no phone or broadband.

They still can't put a date on it though. That's because TalkTalk is completely overloaded and, I increasingly feel, incompetent to handle unbundling.

It's ironic really, because eight years ago, I was cheering on the efforts of Oftel ( as Ofcom was then) to force BT into unbundling. BT argued that it would cause chaos, but we knew unbundling was the only way to get fast broadband and choice.

A smiling BT engineer in Christchurch Road directed me to the Tulse Hill Exchange and put the BT case again, much more convincingly. "Unbundling? Ha ha!" he said.

The exchange, in New Park Road, is an old building, with racks visible inside. It is strange to see the centre of my communications universe, and find it so barren and desolate. The lights are on, and someone is walking around upstairs.

Apparently they've got plenty of other lines to fix before mine though, because mine's still dead.

TalkTalk Troubles

2006-10-03T18:37:00.000-07:00

You're going to tell me I shouldn't be relying on a cheap broadband service. But over the last month, it's been fine, and I do have backup methods onto the net.

So I shouldn't complain too much when TalkTalk started to creak, and left me with no phone or broadband for nearly a week (so far).

Two weeks ago, I had a letter saying "We're sorry you're leaving." I checked, and they said it was sent in error, as my exchange is being upgraded to TalkTalk equipment.

Last week, the broadband, and then the phone, stopped working.

Since then, it's been like my early days on Demon/BT broadband, in the era when nothing could happen without a BT engineer, and everything was uncertain. Phoning TalkTalk gets little help or response. It takes half an hour to get through, after which they take a mobile number and call you, so you can hold on their bill for another fifteen minutes. Or they take a mobile number and promise to text you when they have information - and don't.

When you speak to someone, they can't tell whether you have an account or not, they don't have records of previous calls, they try to shunt you to the "faults" department, and so on.

After five days, I get a (possibly) definitive answer. There was a problem caused when they upgraded the exchange. Why is it taking so long to fix? And why couldn't they tell me that in the first place? No answer.

So what am I doing? I'm talking to you over GPRS - I've got a Nokia E61 (nice Wi-Fi enabled phone) with an O2 SIM. It's giving me dial-up speeds.

As the TalkTalk hold music says "We have got to get it together". They surely have....

Bollywood... with Morris Dancing?

2006-09-18T10:26:00.000-07:00

Not only my kind of film, but Bride and Prejudice seems to be one of the few that can cross the demographic of my family - though there weren't enough Orcs in it for Rachel.

It's got fabulous dance numbers - I haven't seen any real bollywood films, but they reminded me of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers - and plenty of direct quotes from the original Jane Austen. In fact, with the whole strand about arranged marriages worked in very intelligently, an Indian update of the story probably works better than an update into Western society.

And, as a bonus, the Rutland Morris Men appear in it, including an amusing Bollywood style out-take during the credits.

Space Psychosis and Medieval Castration

2006-09-13T14:53:00.000-07:00

I saw two shows in one weekend: a musical about space psychosis with Kitty on Saturday, and a theologian getting castrated at the Globe with Ali on Sunday.

The Dust Collectors was a lot of fun. A completely new musical, put on for a week in the wonderful South London Theatre, dealing with the troubles of astronauts returning to Earth.

This was a theatrical experience you'd be unlikely to get anywhere else, and it went down well with me and nine-year old Kitty. It had some serious strands, some very funny parts, good songs and great choreography. And - amateur theatre gold dust - lots of talented people ,working really hard and having fun.

In Extremis at the Globe Theatre, was the story of Abelard and Heloise, dramatised by Howard Brenton. Theological debate, or love story, or both? They sort of wove together, and the play really worked well - though was Brenton unfair to the mystic Bernard of Clairvaux, chief enemy of Abelard's rationalistic approach to religion? Bernard came on like a fundamentalist freak, and Abelard was a one-man mini-Reformation - and yet, you could see the other side of the arguments... good play.

And it had the kind of comedy business they do well at the Globe.

Best Goose Weepie of All Time?

2006-08-27T22:50:00.000-07:00

I found Fly Away Home in a Helston charity shop for 50p. We all watched it again, for the first time since 1997, a few days before Kitty was born.

It's a family animal weepie, a genre which I have seen far too many of in my time, but it's head and shoulders above the brand leader of that pack, Free Willy. It's got wonderful nature filming, good acting from Anna Paquin and Jeff Daniels, and a story that pulls the usual emotional stops, but leaves some things understated. And it's - sort of - true.

Right from the off, you're rooting for Amy (Anna Paquin). The movie opens and (more or less) closes with long sequences from her viewpoint, where the sound goes away, replaced by music. In that, it's very reminiscent of the fantastic Black Stallion, also directed by Caroll Ballard.

The movie doesn't suffer from the two-dimensional "bad guys" who are probably the most irritating feature of the animal weepie. In the other movies, the bad guys try to kill the whale, dolphin, dog, bear, reindeer or whatever animal the film's about; they usually try to kill the child hero (who's such a whingeing brat you wish they'd succeed). They also endanger the local environment with their evil money-making schemes.

At the end of these movies, the bad guys lose, of course. They get punished. But these are kids' movies, so nothing really bad can happen to them. Nine times out of ten, at the climax of the movie, the bad guys fall in the water. And that's it.

Fly Away Home has a game warden who's not a bad guy - he's against developers but tries to play by the rules. And at the end, a developer just sighs and turns off his JCB. Much more satisfying, much more true.

How true is the movie in the factual sense? I was disappointed to find that Amy is completely invented. There was no girl-with-no-mother, who led her geese to freedom. That whole part of the story is constructed - including a childhood in New Zealand to explain Anna Paquin's accent.

But the dad is based on Bill Lishman, a real sculptor, inventor and pioneer. He was involved in the film, which came out only three years after he really did lead a flock of geese from Canada to the US (a story which apparently everyone else heard of but I missed somehow). He "imprinted" geese for the film, to follow the actors, and the planes they used. His Operation Migration is now working with Whooping Cranes.

I'm impressed by the speed with which they got the story together, and got the film made.

And there's something else. The video box tells me it's the "RSPB's Flim of the Year". I can see that, and the RSPB does sell DVDs, but does it have a film of the year every year? What other movies got the award? Chicken Run? The Birds?

What a heavy printer!

2006-08-23T08:42:00.000-07:00

I'm having a high time this week, entering product reviews and writing news stories at ZDnet.

Here's the highlight so far. Misreading the units in the publishing system, I accidentally published a review (now fixed)which shrunk a Lexmark printer to about six inches high, and increased its weight to 66kg.

Yes. That was the highlight.

Amusing, wasn't it?

TalkTalk comes through

2006-08-22T03:12:00.000-07:00

This morning, I'm a happy bunny.

Yesterday, TalkTalk definitely had problems, but today everything is looking good. This morning, I tried the router again, and it was connected. The password I put in yesterday was working just fine.

There's no technical issues to make this different from other broadband, and at least two of my routers work (the basic old Netgear and the Fritz box).

The Fritz box's snazzy diagnostics tell me I'm getting the same 2 Mbit/s that Pipex was giving me (though the line is actually capable of 8 Mbit/s). But I'm not grumbling.

Just to check things fully, I made a call to Tech support, feeling somewhat embarassed to make a call with no actual support problem. I got connected in about one minute and had a useful conversation. f

Apparently, there were "technical problems with the phone system" yesterday, that cut people off. I had a clear and coherent conversation for two or three minutes today and didn't see any trouble. I asked about the speed and got a sensible answer. I'm getting 2 Mbit/s because they're currently using the BT equipment. By the end of next year, TalkTalk, with "unbundling" hopes to upgrade its own equipment in the majority of exchanges, and will send me a letter when this happens.

My friend in the callcentre tells me that TalkTalk has already upgraded about 30 percent of its customers.

On the basis of this - I say go for it. If you can dial a phone and enter a password to your router, and if saving £20 a month is meaningful, TalkTalk's technology and support seems adequate so far.

The parcel at the Post Office? That turned out to be a re herring - some spring bulbs that are due to be planted now.

TalkTalk is in overload

2006-08-21T05:01:00.000-07:00

I thought the fuss about talkTalk was hyped. The company is promising free broadband, and the media's been full of predictions of doom. The call centres can't possibly keep up etc.

I thought it couldn't be that bad. My finances are such that saving 23.44 a month by not using Pipex sounded a good idea. And a couple of preliminary calls to TalkTalk support got a quick and helpful response. Pipex has been pretty slack at cutting its prices or improving its service, too. So I took the plunge

The switchover date was when I was on holiday of course. And so I got back yesterday, to find the Pipex account is closed, but the TalkTalk one isn't working yet.

There's a parcel at the Sorting Office, which I think is a TalkTalk modem (did I ask for one?) and by the time I realise this, the Sorting Office is closed till tomorrow. But surely, one of the three ADSL routers I have in the house will work?

TalkTalk has a sensible and useful option to get your username and password from an automated (free) phone line. I put those into my ADSL router, and it doesn't work. Maybe there are other settings which I should change, but there's no chance of finding out. Any calls to the helpline get answered within a minute, which is great. Four or five times, I get through to someone in an Indian call centre, and give them my phone number. The bad news is that every single time, I get cut off at that point.

It's a new failure mode in my experience of call centres. The other side of the world, a patient army of people is picking up calls over and over, taking the caller's phone number, then hanging up when the line drops.

So for today at least, it's off to the friendly Internet cafe on Brixton Hill. I guess I'm still better off than the call centre operators.

"I am the sword of the Lord, and pestilence is my sister"

2006-08-01T04:40:00.000-07:00

It's a summer of pre-destination here. The book group's been reading Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five, the classic anti-war book in which Billy Pilgrim flits through time, living his life in a strange order and finding that, from this perspective, everthing is inevitable, sweet and tragic.

I last read this at the age you should read it - late teens. This time round, I was surprised to see how "literary" the book is. This should be no surprise as Vonnegut is an old-school literary author who believes - or at least hopes - in the power of books to change things. So every other page, it seems, has references to books, books and more books. From Celine, to Charles MacCay's Extraordinary Popular Delusions.

He fall foul of one of the problems of books, and the loving way he quotes them. As well as his personal experience, he goes for the facts about Dresden to a book, possibly a brillian one, but it's a book by David Irving, whose status as a historian is now blown. So we don't quite trust the history, but Slaughter House Five is still a great book.

Not quite so taken by the next cult classic, but once again, it's all about pre-destination and evil. I've heard people raving about James Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner as a book which punctures the self-righteous and skewers religion (something Vonnegut likes to do as well). Written in the nineteenth century, and set in Scotland in the eighteenth century, it's the story of someone who "knows" he is justified by faith, not work. It doesn't matter what he does, and he winds up committing horrible crimes.

It's meant to be a prototype "modern" novel, with an unreliable narrator, literary games and more. And, well, yes, all of that is there, but it's not exactly a great read. It's a brilliant idea, and it's fascinating. But as a book, it's got some drawbacks.

1. It's not exactly a page-turner. The structure means you are reading the same events over twice, once told by the editor, and once by the narrator. You know how they turn out, so for a large part of the book, you are (or I was) thinking "get on with it!"

2. The narrator is a dick. This could be an interesting device, but the chilling, deluded seral killer Wringhim is Mr Pooter, who doesn't know how ludicrous he is. Sometimes Hogg goes for comedy (when Wringhim says "I am the sword of the Lord and pestilence is my sister" to his jailors) but mostly he falls between two stools...

3. ...because the theological points aren't that great either. OK, justification and predestination are dangerous ideas. We get the picture.

The history of the book's unpopularity and popularity is interesting. It fell out of favour, and came back in a big way since the 1940s. I think it's due to slump again, as we start to see it as a sort of Frankenstein-esque fable, that's a bit heavy on the moralising.

It does come with an excellent little foreward, which helped me out - it was just the potted summary of the religious and political background to life in Scotland in about 1700.

OK than -- next up on the pre-destination-go-round is The Time Traveller's Wife, by Audrey Niffeneger. No problems with readability there.

See this play: Stay With Me

2006-07-30T15:29:00.000-07:00

I know people always think their mates' plays are the best. So you won't necessarily rush out and see this play on my say-so. But you should.

"Stay With Me" is a youth production, first put on at the South London Theatre. Now it's transferred for a four week run at the Greenwich Playhouse.

It's youth theatre, but not kid's stuff. The actors are great, the directing is good, and the script really gives them something to get hold of. It's two plays, set on the same dates, towards the end of the Second World War. In the first play, a group of young Jews and a Gypsy are waiting in a concentration camp. In the second play, a group of English schoolchildren are trapped in the cellar of their school when a doodle-bug hits.

There's pathos and raw emotion, a surprising amount of humour and - perhaps more surpsising - theology. Where is God in the concentration camp? Who still believes - the boy who keeps the faith, or the boy who says God is not there? Or the boy whose heart says "You can't stop yourself falling in love. You can't stop your heart beating." ? And is it possible for the dead to talk to the living?

There's more information here, and booking details are on that page. There's also comments on the Time Out site.

The Greenwich Playhouse is in a pub, next to Greenwich Station. Get there!

St Anne's Anniversary

2006-07-28T05:38:00.000-07:00

It's fifteen year's since St Anne's Community Centre and Church opened in Soho (the church itself dates back longer). Since Ali worked there for several of those years, we were invited to the party.

And what a great do! We had the fabulous London Gay Men's Chorus who know how to put their heart and soul into a performance, and a bunch of groups and organisations who have made a home at St Anne's.

"We have about 100 people in Church on a Sunday morning, and about 1,000 people come through the Centre in a week," said the Rector, Clare Herbert. They're an interesting bunch of people too.

The London Gay Men's Chorus, by coincidence is celebrating its fifteenth birthday, and we heard them the day before their party in Heaven. Were they on good form? You bet!

I want their CD , "Make the Yuletide Gay" for Christmas.

And then there were other performers, including Carmen Miranda, and a brilliant singer of Spanish songs.

A great night out....

School Holidays means...

2006-07-24T05:17:00.000-07:00

The first "proper" day of the school holidays is here, and for a home-working dad, that means a trip for Monday breakfast to the Brockwell Park Lido with the girls.

And that means a Sunday evening spent getting their bikes back into shape. There are few things I like better than spanners, patches and rubber solution.

Funerals

2006-07-11T08:31:00.000-07:00

So the weekend before last, I went to two memorial services.

One was for Martyn Emery, a friend in the IT industry who died suddenly in his forties, while working away from home. He was a man full of life, liable to argue for the mischief of it, and always coming up with another big plan for the future.

The other was for Gerda "Pytt" Geddes, who taught my Tai Chi teacher, Andreas. I never met her, but she's had an influence on me... and has died aged 88, leaving a not-quite movement of students and followers.

Martyn's memorial was in a church in Brockenhurst, decked with flowers for a wedding the next day, and at a hotel nearby. The event was full of people who wanted to remember him, and felt shocked to lose him.

Pytt Geddes' memorial was in a full lecture theatre at The Place , a contemporary dance colledge in London, where all the students learnt Tai Chi from her. Afterwards about 100 of us went to Regent's Park, and did Tai Chi in her manner. It was very different remembering someone who lived to fulfill more of what she could do.

I didn't have any great observations or revelations from the two services, except for a feeling that life is for living, and sharing. I've spent a lot of time not being in touch with people I know and like, just because I'm not all that good at it.

I'd really rather be enjoying what I do, and sharing it with people I like. So if this might be you, and I haven't been in touch - feel free to make the first move.

"This used to be the best football pitch in Brockwell Park"

2006-06-28T08:19:00.000-07:00

Wednesday is my middle-aged triathlon: I cycle to the park, do Tai Chi, and swim ten lengths of the pool. This morning, as I arrived at the Lido, I met a man who remembers it being built, in 1934.

As a boy he had mixed feelings, because the Lido was built on the best football pitch, - the flattest part of Brockwell Park. He changed his mind later, when mixed bathing came in - first introduced in Peckham Rye Lido, apparently - and you could see girls in their swimming costumes.

Last week I was sharing the pool with two ducks. This week it was a bit busier.

A robot horse in Islington

2006-06-20T22:51:00.000-07:00

Sometimes this blog goes slack when there's other stuff happening elsewhere.

Here's a robot horse I met in Islington the other Saturday. There's another clip at the London Pride blog.

Heatwave's over

2006-06-14T03:37:00.000-07:00

Hard to believe it was 30 degrees in London at the weekend, now it's colder, and wet again.

But here's one of the best bits of that weekend. Cycling to Islington was hot work on Saturday afternoon, but there was a burst water main on the Walworth Road, just before the Elephant and Castle.

What could I do but cycle right through the fountain? Bliss!

Exterminate, says the Dalek Bunny

2006-06-10T13:23:00.000-07:00

My evil brother Davros is visiting, from his secret base hidden in the Far East. His experiments have turned his daughter's harmless toy into an evil killing machine.

I believe it could be his undoing, as I think she will never forgive him.

(actually, we just put the voice box from a Dalek cake, from my nephew's birthday, inside the bunny).

My mid-life accordion

2006-06-10T01:32:00.000-07:00

Appropriately hazy, here's the accordion I borrowed Wednesday. Some men get a Harley or a mistress, I ~~can't afford~~ don't want anything like that - I'm celebrating mid-life with an accordion.

It's a 12-base, two-octave thing, which any player will tell you is only suitable for children or rank beginners.

I'd been doodling at tunes on the piano, and in my mind I "knew" I'd pick it up and be playing instantly, to the admiration of my peers, this being a mid-life thing. In reality of course, I'm fumbling and stumbling at it.

My daughters think it's cool though.

Is Bill Oddie God?

2006-06-06T04:44:00.000-07:00

He's got a white beard and he's tetchy. He sits on a sofa somewhere, where we can't always see him, and he can look inside every nesting box. He cares about every sparrow. He can't do anything to help them, but he feels for them.

He clearly loves the earth in all its richness, and all the creatures on it. He's pained and a bit angry about global warming and what we're doing to the planet.

In last night's programme he mused very effectively on depression and how the natural world can save you from it.

No doubt about it - the more I see Springwatch, the more I'm convinced that Bill Oddie is God.

Now, more advanced theology would then imply that Simon King, out there suffering amongst God's creatures in the Orkneys, is Jesus, and that makes Kate Humble the Holy Spirit. But maybe that's pushing the analogy too far.

Another round of mutants

2006-06-05T01:46:00.000-07:00

Surprise - I loved X-Men 3! Yes, I know, I'm bound to like superhero movies. To me Tootsie is a superhero movie, with all that secret-identity crisis stuff.

But a second sequel, from a comic I overdosed on years ago? I read way too many X-Men issues. Characters would get killed off, and come back, have yet another complete new secret origin, have yet another doomed romance. Or were they really a shape-changing spy under mind-control from Captain America's dead sidekick? Read Wikipedia's entry on Wolverine ( go on read to the end), to see what I mean.

From the start of this series, I like the way the creators have picked up the mass of X-Men stuff, given it a good shake, thrown out anything they don't like, and played with the rest, while keeping faith with the basic idea behind it all.

What they end up with has moments of sheer corn. "We'll have to close the school," says Storm - and instantly, there's a knock on the door, and another scared young mutant comes in, looking for shelter.

But there are so many other bits where it just about gets to the mythic level I always thought was there under the spandex. And they've got the God-like, human presence of Ian McKellen (a lifetime of Shakespeare and he manages to say "What have I done?" without over-acting).

On top of all that, while playing havoc with the idols, they put in enough references to the stuff comic fans want to see (the Danger Room, the Sentinels - hey, there's a guy called Trask! - and plenty more). Only the sickest, saddest comic fan would go away unhappy.

And (unlike that Wikipedia entry) you do need to wait right to the end. There's a great little moment after the credits...

Unicorns are not related to horses

2006-06-04T11:05:00.000-07:00

Many people think that unicorns are related to horses - that they are simply horses with a horn.

Observations in the field reveal that the two animals are quite unrelated species. Look at their hooves.

While the horse has a single hoof on each foot, the unicorn has a cloven hoof, suggesting it is more closely related to the cow. Or possibly the goat - check the beard. It's much easier to imagine a two-horned species evolving a single-horned version, than a non-horned species growing one, isn't it?

This also explains the rarity of unicorns. Unlike horses, they are vulnerable to foot-and-mouth disease, and are often believed to be extinct.

Apologies for the quality of the photos - obviously, they were taken under dangerous conditions.

Lazing on a sunny afternoon

2006-06-03T14:35:00.000-07:00

Kitty and Mackerel making the best use of a sunny Saturday in London. We're back from a week in Cornwall, with lots of family, lots of body-boarding, horse-riding and all the rest of it.

But home is the place to be.

"I need to find a library - fast!"

2006-05-23T11:30:00.000-07:00

That's an immortal line - possibly the only immortal line - from the Da Vinci code. A friend woke up from a profound sleep in the cinema, to hear Tom Hanks say it.

Wouldn't it be a great campaign for our public libraries, infusing them with glamour and excitement?

Hanks and his assistant leap on a double-decker bus and find their way to "Chelsea Library" - a name chosen for familiarity to US viewers (did they reject the Manchester United Library?).

I hope that Dav Vinci Code fans will be following them there. It looks a very nice place, in Chelsea Old Town Hall,

I don't know what happened at the point of the film - and may never find out - but in my mind, I expect they browsed the fiction shelves, joined a book group, looked at the historic costumes collection, did a Yoga class, and went on a local history walk.

Webcasting killed the video star

2006-05-10T04:25:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I presented a live webcast, for Techworld.

We really did broadcast from a studio opposite the Houses of Parliament. I'm told we ousted David Cameron from the studio - as we had the first appointment - but I'm sorry to say I walked past him without recognising him.

If you're interested in mobile email - and Nokia's views on the subject - you can watch it.

I promise to wear a suit for the next one, and not to look so squinty - I had to follow things on that laptop and the text was way small.

Rachel's going to China

2006-05-08T23:51:00.000-07:00

Rachel got the news yesterday, that she's going to China with school, this time next year. We're all excited, and are getting stuff organised.

Like getting her a passport. Poor deprived child - this is the first time she's been abroad, apart from a day trip to France with school. I don't think the school expected anyone to not have a passport yet...

London stopped by elephant

2006-05-07T13:07:00.000-07:00

The last few days, a giant elephant has been wandering round London, courtesy of French theatre troupe, Royal De Luxe. We saw it on its last outing and it was absolutely marvellous.

If you missed it, search on YouTube. You'll probably find more clips like the one above (it's not mine - mine aren't worth putting up).

We changed the weather! Now what about the politics?

2006-05-04T20:59:00.000-07:00

So we danced on May Day, and again on my birthday. All these fertility rituals should be having some effect, yes?

And so they are. Thursday was bright and sunny all day. Kitty was home because her school was shut for the local election poll.

We sat in the garden with the animals - and here they are.

Lengthy aside:- We were voting for local representatives, but it all seemed to be about "national" issues, meaning the political survival of the Prime Minister and three or four individual Cabinet members.

Surely political posts ought to have something to do with thow well people do their job?

Basically, Charles Clarke appears to be incompetent, and John Prescott seems to be a drivelling clown (or are these media creations?). But they've been told they can continue if the local election result isn't too disastrous.

Similarly, the Labour Party goes on tolerating Tony Blair, as long as the "public" likes him.

So yesterday, we are told that our vote is the only way to have any affect on a bunch of increasingly arrogant looking people. And in so doing, we also determine the political future of a whole generation of local politicians, many of whom may not be nearly so self-seeking.

Speaking of May Day...

2006-05-03T23:52:00.000-07:00

I finally saw the Wicker Man last night. It's a tricky film to watch because you already know the end. Everyone does. It's the first thing anyone tells you about the film.

Given that, I actually enjoyed it.

It's obviously cult stuff, so there's plenty on it at Wikipedia, and useful pages explaining what scenes were lost. It also comes in for its share of post-modern analysis "The blank, unstaring face of the Wicker Man is a tabula rasa for anthropological projection, and represents not a particular anthropology (such as pagan or Christian) but anthropology itself, " says a philosopher called Robert Farrow.

I think it's interesting that a lot of people take the "ancientness"of the rituals for granted. In the film, it's very clear that the island's rituals are Victorian-era reconstructions which have themselves become traditions.

There's lots of lovely traditions in the film - an excellent hobby horse and Beltane fires - but it's all been reproduced and engineered the first Lord Summerisle - who obviously read Fraser's Golden Bough (and so can you) - to get the locals to work for him. The film does talk about it being a revival of the ancient religion of the place, but there's a big nod to Victorian revivals.

Which is just like all ritual now. Are these activities ancient, and "authentic"? Are they done out of a "tradition" which might be only a few years old? Or are they "reviving", "reproducing" or "reconstructing" activity recorded 100 years ago - which might in itself be just a reproduction?

There's lots of good academic work on all this of course (try Ronald Hutton) but I also enjoyed a personal acount of it all -- The Magic Spring by Richard Lewis. In the end, we do the rituals we want to, respecting traditions and making our own.

May Day in Deptford had all of this rolled into one of course.

Milkmaids on May Day in Deptford

2006-05-01T22:42:00.000-07:00

We celebrated May Day in Deptford yesterday, with the Deptford Jack in the Green, and Fowlers Troop.

My phone got set on low-res for some reason, so we'll start with a video of some milkmaids, dancing with garlands of silver on their heads.

for more May Day morris action, check the London Pride Morris blog.

Spring is here

2006-04-24T22:22:00.000-07:00

Saturday couldn't have been better. The air filed with blossom and sunshine, I joined London Pride for dancing at a St George's Day Fayre in Acton.

The weather was perfect, the jousting and folk music was fun - and continued with an evening of blues and gospel, at the South London Liberal Synagogue in Streatham. Fresh from a gig at the Borderline, enthusiastic blues guitarist Simon Prager and Masha Vlassova - the Ma Rainey of Muswell Hill - gave us an evening to remember.

Saturday was more the kind of spring day you expect. An AGM at church, lots of rain, and we found we definitely have a hole in our roof. How are we going to pay to fix that? Simon Prager would have a song to get us through - probably from Blind Lemon Jefferson.

First night - the show is begun

2006-04-05T03:11:00.000-07:00

You all want to know how the first night went, don't you? Just fine.

We all knew our lines pretty well, the actions all happened the way they should.

The problems -- the first act is way too long (some of the audience didn't come back after the interval) and the funniest stuff is in the second act which is much shorter (so they missed a treat).

It would be a hell of a job to cut the play though, since the first act is a mix-up of Queen Elizabeth's paranoia and obsession, a hatchet job on Hamlet and some historical games.

This might just work...

2006-03-30T23:41:00.000-08:00

Let's get this in proportion. It's an amateur show. I've got 100 lines. There's other people there, who are doing great stuff.

It will be fine.

It's amazing how helpful it is to have props in hand too. We've got a splendid throne-like chair I borrowed, a quill pen and all sorts of bits and bobs.

Also, I've trimmed my whiskers to something a little more Elizabethan...

Bring back the 70s - we're all doomed here!

2006-03-27T22:44:00.000-08:00

It's just like the 70s today at Judge Towers. The nation is reeling from (possibly) "the biggest industrial action since the General Strike in 1926, and we are all facing environmental doom (the Archbishop of Canterbury is telling us that our plane rides will kill poor people round the world - and he's right).

Kitty is home from school because there aren't any school dinners there, and she's watching the Goodies. (How lucky a father am I? The Goodies DVD was a present for my oldest daughter, along with a second hand phone form eBay. Not many fathers of 14 year olds get away with so little. )

It's like a time-warp. And the pronouncements of Margaret Beckett on the radio, are beyond satire. The government is taking global warming very seriously, so seriously that we're only doubling the capacity of our airports. It could have been much more, she says.

One week to curtain up...

2006-03-27T02:48:00.000-08:00

... and the look you see here is not swaggering self-confidence. More the look of a rabbit in the headlights.

We're going for something a bit more "punk" in the costume and design. We've left the cosy clutter of the rehearsal room for the open stage.

And suddenly, we don't know our lines (or at least I don't).

Catch the look of terror as we have publicity photos taken.

Last night's rehearsal was pure misery - I never knew farce could be so depressing.

It was so bad I nearly didn't use tonight's rehearsal as a (perfect) excuse to skip a church council meeting. If you've been to a church council meeting, you'll know how bad it was.

It was so bad, I fired off a mean and pointless heckle at the stand-up comedy MC in the Theatre bar. I was on my way past the door, back to the rehearsal, and I heard him say "It's OK, you can heckle me," so I did.

I hadn't even been listening to the gig. In fact, I don't ever go to stand-up comedy. And I like the guy. And I said something so pointless it's not worth repeating.

I'm sure the show will be all right. Anne looks like she's enjoying it here. By next Tuesday, I hope to be thoroughly in the mood.

But at home, Alison is rummaging through the video shelf for The Goodbye Girl. You know, the film where Richard Dreyfuss plays an actor who's starring in a terrible camp Richard III, but his girlfriend still loves him....

Rachel the action hero

2006-03-22T04:04:00.000-08:00

Rachel walked 40km at the weekend camping and carrying her food on the way. It was a Duke of Edinburgh Award expedition.

If that's not impressive enough, the first day was her birthday - and she had to be at school at 6.15.

The day after she got back, she hauled herself into school, and acted on stage in the evening, and did the same again on Tuesday.

Today, she's off school looking a bit the worse for wear.

Time for some Ruff stuff

2006-03-20T09:22:00.000-08:00

So, yesterday we had six hours of rehearsal. Can people really put this much work into an amateur play and still enjoy it. Yes!

We got our ruffs, and enjoyed trying them on. I think Anne looks more and more like a raddled Gloriana every rehearsal. Dermot, yes your bum does look big in that.

And my beard. Still not looking Elizabethan. Time to take arms against it.....

The Letter of Marque

2006-03-14T05:00:00.000-08:00

I just finished the twelfth book of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin saga, which started with Master and Commander.

There's no point adding to the general praise which fans heap on the series. It deserves every bit of it. This one is - as ever - the best in the series so far, with a last chapter full of a powerful pleasure that wouldn't mean a thing if you haven't read the previous eleven books.

And you should...

Elizabeth: My Part in Her Downfall

2006-03-14T03:14:00.000-08:00

Things are getting closer and we now have a poster, props and so forth. There's more here, and box office details (hint!).

Learning lines is harder than it was when I acted at school, and I keep getting hung up on really obvious points to do with, well, acting.

When someone is about to snatch a book from you - it may have happened a hundred times before (and it probably will have with the amount of rehearsing I need), but you have to look like you weren't expecting it.

It's one of those things that you think is easy, but actually there's a lot to it - and stuff to (humph) learn even at this late stage....

I'm working hard, though, so I won't be the weakest link. It's going to be a very funny, very silly show.

Count your blessings

2006-03-06T03:00:00.000-08:00

So far, I've "forgetten" and had a drink on three out of the five days, since Lent started last Wednesday. I never quite get to grips with Lent, and yet again, it feels like Christians are out of step with the rest of the world. Everyone else gave up booze in the "secular Ramadan" of January, and they are now busy re-toxing.

And anyway, it's not about giving things up. It's about appreciating what we have, appreciating the world, and being more connected to it all. Christian Aid has a better idea, and a lovely leafelt - "Count Your Blessings" - which gets you to do just that.

Today, the leaflet tells me to give 5p for every fairly-traded, and 10p for every non-fairly traded cup of tea or coffee I have (20p and counting...). Yesterday, it suggested giving 10p for every disease I've been vaccinated against (no idea, but it's probably at least £1.50).

I'd recommend this one to anyone, of any religion or none.

Bad English is evil

2006-03-06T00:55:00.000-08:00

Here's a refreshing start to a Monday morning. A post on the Authority blog sends me off to read Orwell. Specifically, his excellent essay Politics and the English Language

This isn't altogether expected. The Authority blog is written by journalist Michael Cross and sponsored by local authority IT supplier Civica. And, from my experience of local authorities and IT suppliers, neither world is particularly concerned with good English.

But a look at the essay reminds me of two things:

Bad English is evil. Not unfortunate or disappointing but, by allowing sloppy thinking that might permit evil, actually evil.

It is actually possible to stand against this sort of evil.

There's a third, somewhat depressing thought, though. Orwell was writing of the decay of politics in 1946 - just a year after the Labour party arrived and when - from our prespective - politics was really alive. The welfare state was being started, and Churchill was out, on a 72.6 percent turnout in the 1945 general election.

Compare that with now. You don't need me to draw the comparision. Over here, the politicians have nothing to offer but words. Those words are now without meaning. And over in the US, you can get up an invasion on the basis of lies and fudge.

And even Orwell has become the thing he hated: an abused cliche.

So - I'm a real historical character!

2006-03-03T02:41:00.000-08:00

Well I never. Bizarre though this play may be, I'm a historical character! Thomas Egerton, chief of police in Dario Fo's Elizabeth: Almost by Chance a Woman, was in fact one of her chief advisors, along with Cecil and Bacon (a different Bacon from the one who "wrote Shakespeare's plays", I believe). Ben Jonson wrote a poem to him.

The play happens at the time of the rebellion led by the Earl of Essex in 1601. I wonder if the queen really did call Egerton a "fuckwit" and point a pistol at him?

The Vampire Bunny?

2006-03-02T08:49:00.000-08:00

Watching early Buffies (yet again) with the girls, I couldn't help feeling that the big bad guy in Series One looks familiar.
Something about the pink nose rang a bell.

Then I saw Rachel's rabbit, Salt...

Bum-rolls and Beards

2006-03-02T08:19:00.000-08:00

This blog may go a bit thesp for the next few weeks. Normal rubbish about children, church and wireless should resume eventually.

Monday night we had a frock-fest. Nearly everyone else gets to wear a skirt, with a bit of Elizabethan padding known (in the theatre at least) as a bum-roll.

Anne as Elizabeth I looks "like a knitted toilet roll holder" according to one observer (which is apparently more or less the effect we're aiming for).

Dermot looks fine in his bum-roll as Dame Grosslady, but he will have to lose the beard apparently.

And then there's the question of my beard. I'm going to have to do something goatee and Elizabethan-or- with it

Luckily there's plenty of pix online, as the Guardian runs an article about what Shakespeare really looked like.

My searches for Elizabeth Beards lead me to a play called The Beard of Avon an American play which sounds a good enough proposition for someone to have a go at over here. The idea is that bumbling-but-good-with-couplets Will Shakespeare runs away with the theatre, to get away from his wife, and ends up in London, where he becomes a "beard" for prominent people who want their plays put on anonymously - starting with the Earl of Oxford, obviously including Bacon and finally even Queen Bess, who write The Taming of the Shrew.

Almost by Chance in a Dario Fo Play

2006-02-27T04:21:00.000-08:00

So, unexpectedly, I'm in a Dario Fo play. Turned up at the wrong audition at South London Theatre, and found myself with the part of Egerton, a spymaster, in "Elizabeth: Almost By Chance a Woman", a foul-mouthed political farce set in the latter days of Elizabeth I.

The good news is I'm one of only six actors, we have a great director, and lots of ambitious plans for props, set and costumes. And it might be funny!

The bad news? Well, I'm feeling a lot more exposed now I'm off the chorus line. The show is on a lot quicker than I thought, so we have five weeks to get it together. It clashes with almost everything else in my life, and the rest of the family are a bit miffed.

Alos, I have to break it to the Sunday School, who said our panto was the best they'd been to, that this swear-fest might not be suitable for them (though I reckon any teenager doing the Tudors should enjoy seeing Elizabeth as a "moody, manipulative, foul-mouthed, incontinent hermaphrodite").

And I have to tell my Morris team that, yet again, I'm going to miss a lot of practice - including tonight!

NetEvents nerds raise cash for cancer

2006-02-24T02:32:00.000-08:00

Picture(18)
Originally uploaded by judgecorp.

Nan Chen of Strix is holding a cheque for $32,000 raised in a charity auction at NetEvents.

The money is forCancer Research and the Prostate Project. It was raised in an auction of items including six bottles of pink wine, two World Cup tickets (to see France v Togo) and a ride in Manek Dubash's Aston Martin.

Well done everyone!

Another fine mess...?

2006-02-24T00:00:00.000-08:00

These NetEvents meetings are not just speed-dating for nerds. Oh dear me no. They are so much more.

In interactive sessions round a table, we get the skinny on top companies' tech strategy, and even help to shape it.

Steve Vogelsang is a VP of the data networking division of ECI Telecom - which was created when ECI bought a company called Laurel Networks.

I was able to suggest a strategy that I believe they will now take forward. They absolutely have to buy Hardy Networks.

Then they can move on and buy Keystone Networks and launch products that implement the COPS protocol.

Municipal wireless is like platform shoes

2006-02-23T02:19:00.000-08:00

"Everything goes in buying cycles, because we forget how awful it was the last time around," says Ian Keene, analyst at Gartner, talking at NetEvents. "Like platform shoes.

"Maybe local governments are only building theirown wireless networks, because they've forgotten what a pain it is to own your own network. It's fifteen years since they owned their own cables. All those people have retired by now, so they think 'own our own networks? Great idea.'"

But he admits he might just be being negative. Wireless can be much easier to deploy. And there are some very useful applications, like CCTV (easy to move cameras around), environmental monitoring, and so forth.

But the big headline-grabbing application, Internet access, could be a flash in the pan, he says. Public access and regeneration are political issues, not driven by real user pull, he says: local governments are generally felt to be poor service deliverers, so will people use their metro networks? .

And the technology issues is a surprise too. There's a fixation on Wi-Fi, and Keene is surprised that few - in fact, he says absolutely no - local authorities are planning to use the operators' 3G networks for their own applications.

Single Point of Failure - the power cord

2006-02-23T01:50:00.000-08:00

OK, so I should get a newer laptop that can actually live on batteries for an appreciable length of time.

But I never spotted this particular single point of failure. My power lead just started crackling. I've borrowed one, but I'm maybe not going to be online as much as I thought.

Time to put my attention back into the room, I guess...

NetEvents in Germany

2006-02-23T01:32:00.000-08:00

I'm blearily listening to a product marketing geezer talking about his network security product. There's snow outside. It must be NetEvents.

I've been coming on these computer-industry speed-dating events for years now. In the next two days, I'll get about 20 hours of product spiel.

The difference is, now we are all on wireless. This means Guy Kewney can post the news, and I can switch off and play around and write this.

The bad side of this is, I'm not sure I have enough attention left in the room to pick up on any interesting debates that might actually happen.

Physics through Morris Dancing.

2006-02-20T07:15:00.000-08:00

So, tonight. my Morris side is dancing to explain science. We're showing how Rayleigh scattering makes the sky blue. We will have to explain it to weather forecaster Sian Lloyd, so I've done a quick check on the Web to revise how Rayleigh scattering works.

And of course, this being the Internet, there's also a rock band of the same name. They have tracks to download, but unfortunately, their music is the wrong tempo to use as we dance our explanation.

I have a theory that within the next few years, reall information will disappear on the web. Already, you bump into obscure rock band at an out-of-the-way American universities have nearly got it covered. When China really takes off and completely adopts capitalism, the world supply of alienated students will be multiplied by a factor of 100, and all Internet search terms will lead to rock bands.