The Vampire Bunny?

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

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

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

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...?

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

"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

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

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.

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.

With this RFID tag, I thee wed

Apparently a couple has exchanged RFID tags in the US. The radio beacons, implanted under their skin, give them access to each other's house, car, computer and so on.

This sounds very modern - they're also modern enough, you'll notice, to be a couple but not to actually be living together - and it certainly could have practical benefits.

Take me, for instance. I'm currently not exactly sure where my wedding ring is. I took it off because it was irritating a cut on my finger, and Alison put it in a drawer to keep it safe. But which drawer?

Now, if we'd had RFID tags implanted instead, there'd be no danger of losing them.

Thank goodness - Civil Partnership is old hat

I went to my first Civil Partnership ceremony on Saturday. That's officialese for Gay Wedding - legal in Britain since December. I like the official phrase because it expresses the ordinariness of the occasion.

Not ordinary, as in dull, disappointing or anything like that. It was, like any wedding, a wonderful occasion. And actually a bit more so because - like a lot of the first Civil Ceremonies - it was between two people who've already been together for years. There were lots of family members and lots of friends, and a certain feeling of "about time too".

Two months on from the start of Civil Ceremonies, there are a lot of ways in which Civil Partnerships are - and should be - old hat. The registrar looked very pleased to be doing the ceremony, but it clearly wasn't her first, and there have been plenty more in Marylebone Registry Office.

That's the mark of a real change: when it's unremarkable.

Worm speed record

Ever noticed how fast worms travel? I was watching a big one in the park, moving across a large tarmac area.

Ten seconds elapsed between the first picture and the second one, and a distance of three or four inches.
I say, well done, worm!

Sleeping bunnies - the most useful page on the Web

Our rabbit, Salt, needs medication in a sensitive area. Given how big a rabbit's back legs are and how sharp his claws are (they're made for digging!) this could be a risky business.

But not for us! I happened to stumble on a page where someone called Miriam explains how to put a bunny into a trance. Lay it on its back, and stroke its nose and cheeks.

With Salt, it works without fail, in a few seconds. This is the best "sleeping bunny" pic we have so far. More later.

Hacking playground memes

My girls were very keen to teach me the three hand gestures used in the Phones 4 U adverts.

"Hannah taught it to us," they said.

"Why?" I asked.

"Because it's in an ad."

"Yes, but why do you want to do something from an ad?"

Finding that particular advert personally very irritating indeed, was enough to fuel a satisfying rant:

"Girls, have you heard of memes? There's a point of view that our entire purpose on earth is to reproduce our genes. Some people say a chicken is just an egg's way to make another egg, and there's no meaning to our lives. We're just doing what our genes require us to do.

"But luckily, it's not that simple. We're social animals. We have culture, and we pass that on. So now, our entire purpose is to reporoduce these ideas, which people call memes. So now, our lives have no real purpose. We're just doing what these memes need us to do."

"Unless... how about this? Why does it have to be phones? WHy not something else?"



Hopefully, "bogies 4 U" is going round the playground even now...

IT supplier calls for digital speed bumps?

There can be such a thing as too much technology, too powerful an interaction with our contacts, clients and colleagues. It could be time to put some speed bumps on what we used to call the superhighway.

That's what William Davies is arguing in the February issue of Prospect. I picked up his article from a link at Authority, an intriguingly titled blog filed by Michael Cross, on the web site of public sector IT supplier Civica.

Simplifying and parodying a long essay, Davies seems to be saying that by texting and emailing wherever we are, and doing business online, instead of in queues in the high street, we are dissolving society. We aren't doing do "real" stuff locally, anymore.

I know that's a poor translation, but I think I agree with what he's actually saying. I know I value local things where I meet actual people (the book group, church, the theatre) more than my work areas, where increasingly it feels like I interact with a shadowy bunch of geeks.

I've notice a paradox when those local groups go online, and "real" contacts turn into online ones. My fellow thesps, suffering from panto withdrawal, have been spamming each other with amusing Internet links, but now those who are on work email addresses are starting to drop out, because it's invading a different bit of their lives, and their IT managers and bosses are complaining.

It's interesting to get the "speed bumps" idea via that Authority blog. Davies is suggesting that IT should be limited, and it's passed on by an an IT supplier. Does Civica actually want to limit the IT it supplies to local authorities?

In fact, Davies' essay winds up by pointing out ways in which technology can help to protect and enhance isolation and silence (um, in a good way). I'll be interested to see how that might translate into stuff that a company like Civica might deliver....

To end, I like this quote from Davies:

"Telecommunications technologies have effectively flooded the market for social contact, rendering the market value of that contact worthless, just as would happen to gold should alchemy become possible."

I might spam that round my thesp buddies...

Turkish Delight - the results!

Turkish Delight
Originally uploaded by judgecorp.

Looks good enough to eat? Well do come over and have some, then. It's a bit sickly, dripping in syrup and far too honey-flavoured. Even Kitty says it's too sweet.

So thanks, Hugh Fearnly-Whittingstall (for it was his River Cottage Family Cookbook that provided the recipe)!

Apparently, since the Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe came out, sales of Fry's Turkish Delight have gone up by 200 percent (didn't people notice, it's the Witch - the baddy who gives Edmund the Turkish delight?).

I also found out that I am the only one in my family who hums "Fry's Turkish Delight" to one of the tunes in Lord of the Rings. As far as I can remember, one of the main tunes from the films comes straight from the Turkish Delight adverts. Not the recent ones, but the ones from the 1970s.

I can't find that tune on the Web, but I know it's the same, and I remember the ads. The sweets were Full of Eastern Promise, and the ads were full of slave girls. And a giant eunuch bringing a sword... to slice open a piece of Turkish delight.

Making Turkish delight

Making Turkish delight 2
Originally uploaded by judgecorp.

The girls were desperate to make Turkish Delight. We got a "family cookbook" for Christmas, by Hugh Fearnley Whatisname. It tells you how to mash potatoes and boil eggs, but the Turkish Delight is what interested us.

It involved lots of sugar, cream of tartar, cornflour and rosewater. Also pink food colouring, which the girls discovered is great for fake wounds.

Goodbye Bubble

One of our cats died yesterday. Bubble was ten years old - an average age for a cat, but that made her older than Kitty and nearly as old as Hannah.

She was ailing, off her food and getting thinner. When we took her to the vet she got distressed and went into heart failure. There was only one thing to do.

The girls were all very upset to lose her. We buried her in the front garden, under paving slabs that should keep off the foxes.

Ali and I are upset too. But feel a twist of guilt as, without her, we can stop putting out cat litter, and worrying that the furniture will get peed on (she really hadn't been well for some time). Our remaining cat, Mackerel, despite having only three legs, is more robust, somehow.

Kitty has already decided that, since the other girls each had two animals for their tenth birthday, she will have two kittens. It's 18 months away though...

A Celtic journey

Freezing cold yesterday, and I was zigzagging across town. Finally, at 10.15pm, I was riding home with very tired legs

What got me home was a burst of Celtic energy on Rado 3's splendid Late Junction.. There was something particularly wonderful about whizzing round the Aldwych and over Waterloo Bridge to the tune of Scottisn and Irish music - all on Monday's programme.

Late Junction sometimes lurches into twaddle, but for a good hit-rate on music that makes you think twice. it can't be beat. And it certainly kept me jolly on the way home last night.

Samuel Palmer

I just went to the Samuel Palmer show at the British Museum. Absolutely wonderful. If you haven't seen it, sorry. It finishes tomorrow.

I've loved Samuel Palmer for years. I used to look at the Magic Apple Tree (pictured) at the Fitzwilliam Museum whenever I could at Cambridge. I never knew what a prodigy he was - founded The Ancients at the age of 19 - and I never knew his melancholy later work. And I never knew he was yet another South London resident - he lived off the Old Kent Road for a time.

There aren't many artists who can take such a personal take on landscape and communicate it to you in art. He's in a line from Durer through Blake to Stanley Spencer, and...

The sun was shining, and the clouds looked very Palmer-esque, with flocks of birds wheeling across the sinking sun. On the way home, the bus took us past the homes of Blake and Van Gogh, in Hercules Road and Hackford Road.

Welcome to the world of "Thought leadership"

"I thought you might be interested in the attached thought leadership piece from XXX which examines the issue of mobile working," says an email I just got. It's from a PR and it's offering an article which I might (they hope) want to publish.

I do love the term "thought leadership piece"! It conjures up images of radical proposals, a slice of Nietsche or Bertrand Russell.

Instead, what I get is 750 words, which starts (I'm not making it up) "In today’s increasingly competitive market place, businesses know that they need to be able to compete effectively... " and ends up "A fully thought out plan is an essential first step in joining the new mobile business paradigm, where business is done anywhere, any time."

The whole thing is such wearying garbage. Even more wearying is the thought that I also write this stuff for money, myself.

Sleeping Beauty Starts Tomorrow!

Sleeping Beauty starts tomorrow at the South London Theatre. With me in the Chorus, and Kitty (pictured) as a Fairy. It is going to be a lot of fun!

There are plenty more photos where you can see our scary baddy, beautiful princess, dashing prince and plenty more.

If you want tickets - you do, don't you? - rush to the South London Theatre. The box office is open every night this week, and the show goes on till Saturday 14th.

Lambeth's crazy parking fines...

Other people's parking problems are possibly the most boring thing in the world, but have a look at these pictures from outside my house today. I don't know whose car it is , but they just got a £50 fine for parking "on the pavement" where "on the pavement" is defined as having about two inches of their tyres up on the kerb. Incredible!

Welcome to (ahem) my little place

Yes, that's right, if you're ever passing Cambridge, do drop into the Judge Business School. Just mention my name and you're sure to get a warm welcome....

On a visit to Cambridge last week, I got to fulfill a long-held ambition. Not to found a Business School, but to visit one that happens to have my name. And get my photo taken in the very fanciful foyer.

The Judge school is a fantastic looking building, and it's worth checking the much better pictures at John Outram architects. It's immediately opposite my old College, Peterhouse (also named after me - in the year 1284) in what used to be the Old Addenbrookes Hospital. This was a strangely useless neighbour as a student: a friend got a rusty railing through his foot, while trying to climb into college, and the Casualty department was in the New Addenbrookes, outside town. .

Yes, but see the lights....

But it really is nearly Christmas. We went with my mum to see some lovely Christmas Lights, in Newstead Road in Hither Green. It's someone's front garden, and they've gone right over the top, including turning their front room into Santa's Grotto. Well worth a look if you're passing round London's wonderful South Circular road. And they're collecting for charity.

And PS: Got the Christmas CD from the Jazz Protagonists, and it's getting a lot of play here. Is it good jazz,? I don't know. but Kitty loves it, and it's changing my feelings about Baptists from Texas...

How Tony Blair made the Tories electable

I just had a spam, signed by Jo Brand, fishing for donations to the Labour Party. The pitch is that with David Cameron's new-found popularity, the Tories are a threat, so we'd better all pull together.

If it's true, then who's responsible? Tony Blair "made Labour electable" in the 1990s (or was that a combination of John Smith and the fact that there weren't any Tories left?). Looks like he's now done the same trick for the Tories.

The Tories are now more evil and uncaring and generally hopeless than at any time since Thatcher, and yet they are ahead in the polls. There's only reason I can think of for this incredible fact, and it's Tony Blair. He lied, to take us to a stupid war that's done no good. NOBODY TRUST TONY BLAIR.

I've sent an email back of course. But thought I'd put it here.

Don't get me this for Christmas!

It's from Victorinox. It's a Swiss Army knife. It has a USB memory.

Now that has been done before. But this time they've outdone themselves with the gift that would say you are a total twat.

It's 18 karat gold. It can be engraved with your monogram. It starts at 1Gbyte. It costs from 980 euros. And it doesn't even have a knife blade, because you can't take knives on planes.

My rusty steed

My bike is nice. It cost £35 second hand when I had my previous one stolen two years ago. I've added mudguards, dynamos, but it's the same old ten-speed, Reynolds 531 frame, blue painted, with a dent here and there.

But it's not getting the love it deserves. Since I went on the BMX track with my nephew, it's got a wobble (yes - I managed to leave the ground!). The chain is showing rust. The back mudguard needs another mend with duct tape - a fourth one - where a stay came loose. And today the back gear cable broke, so it's actually a tw-speed.

All right. It deserves care and attention. It's out there in the dark at the moment. But tomorrow, without fail, I will oil the chain. At the very least.

O Come O Come and Search

My sheer innocent delight in the Internet has been restored.

The group test of Linux desktop products I did for ZDNet was quoted in Slashdot. ZDNet was pleased and got lots of traffic, but I saw the review ripped apart and myself described as a "trained Windows monkey" (wrong about the training, guys!). So, I'm feeling a little bruised.

But last Friday, Alison said "I'm leading a quiet day for St Matthews, and I need O Come O come Emmanuel. Will they have it in the rocord shop?" Record shop? I'm on the Internet right away.

A Google Search finds a ton of links and I start sifting. There's

• a free folk version from the Burns Sisters at Amazon
• a crisp, brisk choral version at the excellent Center for Church Music
• An arrangement for four horns
  
• a sample of an irritating evangelical style version
• A nice solo version on a site infested with yucky pop-ups
• A cool version from the Jazz Protagonists, who (it says here) are "San Antonio's No.1 Jazz Band"
  
• A very dignified and peaceful plainsong version from the robed chaps of the North American College Music Chapel Choir
• various sites offering tracks for 99c
• Lots of MIDI versions, of course

Within an hour, I've burned a CD for Ali, and ordered a copy of the Jazz Protagonists' album We Three Kings, because the clips sound so nice, and I like their site.

And within a week, I get a friendly email from the Protagonists' pianist Barry Brake, offering me a three-for-two offer on the CD, and sharing memories of Brixton (I declare, everyone has been to Brixton!).

See what I mean? The Internet is just as good as it ever was!

It's panto time again (oh no it isn't)!

This year's South London Theatre Pantomime looks like being a good one. Sleeping Beauty will feature me in the chorus and Kitty as one of the fairies.

It's on 3-14 January, but we've been rehearsing for weeks now. Mostly in West Norwood's gay bar Ego. Apparently this is "South London's premier gay and lesbian night spot". It's not as exciting or sleazy as the site suggests, although I've never been there later than 10pm.

I cna tell you what happens in the back room though. In the early evening, it's full of a bunch of poeple shouting "Hiya Kids!" and "He's behind you".

Two children's books I liked

"It was a dark blustery afternoon in spring, and the city of London was chasing a small mining town across the dried-out bed of the old North Sea." That has to be one of the more "perfect" opening lines of any book (The Towers of Trebizond, hah!).

It's the start of Mortal Engines by Philip Reeve, a story of mechanised cities fighting each other for the scarce resources of Earth, and coming up against the immovable heresy of the Anti-Traction League, while airships duel overhead and the ancient evil technology is revived.

It's exactly the kind of book I'd have loved aged 11 to 13, with action all the way, cliff-hangers, mysterious characters, and all the rest of it. None of the girls have picked up on it, even though I've left it lying on the stairs, but I have hopes. It's got sequels, too...

Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories, on the other hand, is going down a storm with Kitty. It's a perfect children's book - a sort of fairy story about story-telling. Haroun goes through all sorts of troubles on Earth's other moon, that is the source of the world's stories.

Can he restore the abilities of his father Rashid, the greatest story teller in the world? Can he save all the stories of the world from poisoning by the cultmaster, Kattam-Shud whose aim is to write finito at the end of them?

It's beautifully written - and really exciting, says Kitty. There's lots of characters that simply demand to be read out loud in funny voices, and morals that aren't laid on too thick or spelt out.

updating old sites

I've just been updating my old static site, Peter Judge. Still useful to have it there, but it's obviously a really obsolete way to do things.

Every time I update it, I'm using a different FTP client, I'm re-remembering what my storage limits are. And the rest of the time, it's really out of date.

Any "real" web person would be able to integrate a blog with the important static content, and keep the blog updated. And wouldn't be using FrontPage, either...

And don't get me started on my church's site, which I supposedly have responsibility for...

That Goblet...

Well, of course we went to the Harry Potter film at the weekend. And we liked it.

We had another family with us, who brought a friend who -- gasp -- was getting her first encounter with Harry Potter. Hard to credit, but there are people out there who actually haven't read any of the books or seen any of the films. Incredible. Yet somehow they live...

"Don't worry with the synopsis," she said, as people tried to sum up the first three films to her. Some of us felt she absolutely needed to know about Voldemort. "OK - Voldemort. Is he played by Robbie Coltrane?"

The two eight year olds were up the far end of the row, with an adult I hope, and we started sliding off the Ritzy chairs. They thought it was the best film ever. I dozed off for a minute about 15 minutes in, and stayed with it after that.

Not as good as the third one, I thought. Less chance for the children to show any personality, except in a closed-off little story line about the Yule Ball. The whole scene in the graveyard was good and -- after all the "Who dies?" fuss when the book came out -- the death at the end was very well handled. Mad-Eye Moody was great

They did well to chop out all the stuff they did. As we walked home, Nan got round to missing House Elves and Rita Skeeter's come-uppance, and all the other bits and bobs. Did you know there's a character called Ludo Bagman in the book? Anyone else remember him and want him in the flm?

Maybe the last book should be chopped down and adapted to a film first, then handed to someone else to novelise, before it gets published as a book.

Five Linuxes in a week

I've been busy over at ZDNet reviewing Linux distributions. So far the Red Hat and SUSE ones are online. Mandriva, Novell Linux Desktop and Ubuntu still to come.

I think I was chosen for my lack of Linux experience. The reviews are intended to be from the point of view of a business looking at putting in desktops for non-technical workers, so I was given the task of installing, setting up, and connecting to a minimal set of business tools - files, printers, IM, ands Exchange email, calendar and contacts.

I found a bunch of very solid products but - because of the constraints of the review series - I've wound up with a limited view. My favourite Linux is still running on my spare machine at home and I like it. But while I've linked it to all the things I was told to connect to, I still haven't got a USB drive working on it...

A new kind of radio?

So I'm in Florida to see xMax, a new kind of radio technology from a company called xG. The details are all on Techworld, and you can also see stuff at xG's site.

The demo we saw appeared to send data from a 50mW base station, using an omnidirectional antenna, to a receiver 18 miles away. Now that is impressive - consider how small a signal that is, when you reach that radius!

Now, such demos are often prey to claims that they might have been faked. This one has been checked over by Princeton professor of electrical engineering Stuart Schwartz, but the journalists on the trip still did our best to check things out.

Here is radio wizard Rupert Goodwins of ZDNet checking the antenna connections to the black box and the oscilloscope, while the inventor, Joe Bobier, talked to the rest of us.

But when it came to the base station, we had to take their word for it. Was it really a 50mW signal? Was the antenna really omnidirection (a crucial point, since a directional antenna would have given a far better power level at the receiving station.

I'm afraid we had to take the word of Bobier and Schwartz, because the transmitting station is at the top of an 850 foot tower, in the middle of the hurricane-battered Everglades.

Jogging In Florida

I'm at the Westin in Fort Lauderdale. It has a jogging track. Perhaps more of a challenge than some jogging tracks...

A temptation (not) resisted

I'm at the Wi-Fi business development summit in Milan. I'm in a theatre in a conference centre owned by IBM. And I'm on Wi-Fi of course.

I notice that my phone has no signal. Not a poor signal, but a completee absence of GSM. the explanation is pretty obvious - the walls are metal. This is deliberate. No one at the conference so far has had to say "please turn off your mobile phones", because IBM made the whole theatre into a Faraday cage.

So the temptation is clear: I really should turn the sound up on the laptop, and get someone to phone me on Skype. I won't of course, but it would be worth it, to see the IBM staff's double take, and to have the first phone to ring in the centre.

On the other hand, I could ring someone else's Skype. How about Nico MacDonald who is sitting at the back? Of course, he too has his volume down. Ah well, back to the conference session.

Sex and violence

Just a quick thought. Sex and violence are the two things on TV to which children's access is limited. But as a parent, I react to them in opposite ways.

With sex, I am happier if it's realistic - ie non-pornographic, and portrayed with its consequences and attendant emotions. With violence, the more realistic it gets, the more unhappy I am.

I'm thinking that because we're all hooked on Firefly, the cult-TV-series (thanks to Eamonn Sullivan, who lent us the DVDs).

It's a 15, but then so is Joss Whedon's previous opus, Buffy, and that went out at tea-time on UK TV. There's been implied sex right from the start, with a major character being a "Companion" or high-class call-girl, but it's only in Episode ten when there is torture, that I start to think, is this all right for everyone? Actually, if there's torture, I'd rather it was unrealistic, like the machine in the Princess Bride, than seeing someone's ear cut off....

On the whole, I'm happy to trust Whedon's moral universe and press on. It's great character-driven storytelling. The girls are all hooked, and sing the theme tune all the time....

But violence. Why do we watch it? Is it different because I can't actually imagine real pain and am genuinely scared of it?

Do phones do too much?

When I mentioned I'd been to a smartphone show, it sparked that old conversation about how "phones do too much".

Well, I said. I was synchronising my calendar this morning and speaking on the phone at the same time. Then later in the day, on the same phone, I was listening to the radio and taking pictures at the same time.

The point is that this is not on a "smartphone", but a standard-ordinary phone that I got free with a low-rate contract (a Sony Ericsson K700i if you want numbers). It's not a toy I've borrowed or splashed out to get. It's an ordinary day-to-day phone.

While I was at the show, I tried email on it. I wouldn't recommend this as an email device - it doesn't show very many messages on screen, and jumbles the subject fields so you can't see which message came from whom. But it does email (and unlike my friend Kieren I found it quite easy to set up).

The camera is adequate, and so is the FM radio. It also synchs by Bluetooth without too much tweaking, and displays calendar appointments and contacts very nicely.

I don't think phones do too much. If anything, they still do too little. The features they have are often still fiddly. What is happening now is that they are starting to make it easy to do the things they do. Email and the web are the next things to be made easy (see O2's i-mode and T-Mobile's Web'n'walk for instance)

Like I say, I'm looking at what can be done on a more-or-less bog-standard phone. Smartphones and higher featured phones may do it better and easier - in a bigger heavier package - but the baseline level of phone can pack quite a lot of fun.

Next, I'm going to use voice dialling...

Washing the guinea pigs

Kitty and I washed Hannah's guinea pigs on Saturday. Here are some pictures of the occasion

Howl's Moving Castle

A lovely film -- we emerged into the evening sunshine in Clapham, and the world looked different. The yellow handrails on the 137 bus were brighter, and the sky was bluer.

It's all about love and connection. It's a lot like Spirited Away (in fact some of the characters look a little too much like the characters in Spirited Away.

I think Spirited Away might be a better film. It felt more as if it came from the folk tales of a real country, not from a made-up world. Howl seems to have moved into a more multi-national world with bigger distribution and (I think) bigger names on the English soundtrack.

But Howl's moving castle is what it said it is. Moving.