Now comes that part of the year when you rush out and buy those odds and ends that you hoped you’d get for Christmas but didn’t because no one in your family really understands the real you – no matter how many times you try to explain it to them.
Year: 2002
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Why does the BBC hate the shows it buys?
So you’re a massive public service broadcaster that employs roughly forty thousand people, running a number of national and international TV shows and radio stations as well as having the most trafficked website in Europe. And you buy some American TV shows to show as part of your output. These shows have a substantial fan-base. Why on earth would you abuse them so terribly!? When there was an episode of this popular TV shows that was nominated for an Emmy – an episode I might add that was particularly celebrated and considered to be a particularly special one – what would you do? Would you hack it to death and then completely neglect to advertise it – even after postponing it for two weeks so you could show the bloody snooker? Why does the BBC hate the shows it buys? Why doesn’t it buy stuff it has faith in and then treat it accordingly? Stunningly irritating.
What kind of weird inspired genius would buy me a present like this? That’s not to say it wasn’t an inspired choice – because I always get very excited when Diarmuid proceeds to spend my licence fee on a nice garden for someone else. He does such beautiful work. He’s a proper designer. Not like that hack Llewellen-Bowen. Oh no. When they work together you can feel the friction between classy designer and hack…
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On copy-protected CDs…
So I got my first copy-protected album this morning as a gift for Christmas. Or at least I think it was copy-protected. My first reaction? I’m going to have to take it back. My main places for listening to music? On my iPod, my home computer playing through my stereo (how else can you get massive amounts of tracks played randomly?) or on my iBook. I still buy CDs – in fact I buy loads of them. But as a rule they get ripped to my computer and then stacked neatly on a shelf never to be played again. As far as I’m concerned, CDs are a content-delivery system (like software coming on CD-ROMs), not a media to be played…
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On Tiny imperfections…
There’s the smallest imperfection on the track-pad of my iBook. It’s atom-sized, it’s a mote – a tiny little piece of dust that’s unremovable and feels like a microscopic coarseness when I run my index finger over it. It irritates me more than I can possibly explain. And my feeble attempts to rub it down or remove it with my fingernail make me scared that I’m going to wreck the pad or put a huge scratch across it. I can’t do anything about it though, and it’s clearly not reason enough to take the machine back. So I’m hoping that expurgating my irritation on the weblog page – venting my repressed micro-rage – will allow me to get back to loving the rest of my beautiful and awesome machine. And if that doesn’t work, maybe buying an Airport card will…
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For essentially the same reasons
For essentially the same reasons that I paid Blogger money to go pro, I will certainly be buying NetNewsWire Pro when it is finally released. The beta has just been put online and I’ll be downloading it as soon as I’m near a decent web connection. The lite version is such a staple part of my daily life now that it would be churlish not to help fund further developments. If only there were a decent PC version for those less Mac-fortunate…
I’m trying out the posting functionality now – and frankly I’m very very impressed. This could totally transform the way I write as well…
No real reason. Just wondering. Does anyone know if the Bloggies are happening again this year?
I’ve been reading Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework, by D.C. Englebart (Stanford, 1962) and there’s this really interesting paragraph in it that I think is true:
The process of developing this conceptual framework brought out a number of significant realisations: that the intellectual effectiveness exerxised today by a given human has little likelihood of being intelligence limited — that there are dozens of disciplines in engineering, mathematics and the social, life and physical sciences that can contribute improvements to the system of intellect-augmentation means: that any one such improvement can be expected to trigger a chain of coordinating improvementsl; that until every one of these disciplines comes to a standstill and we have exhausted all the improvement possibilities we could glean from it, we can expect to continue to develop improvements in this human-intellect system; that there is no particular reason not to expect gains in personal intellectual effectiveness from a concerted system-oriented approach that compare to those made in personal geographic mobility since horseback and sailboat days.
Anyway this got me thinking about social software and what it’s relationship was to this kind of intellect-augmenting philosophy and I suppose I came to the conclusion that the objectives of social software were to do with the cyborgisation or augmentation of human beings. In particular I thought of that the functions of social software were threefold:
- removing the limitations placed on social contact by external factors such as language and geography.
- compensating for the overloads that this removal of limitations might generate.
- uncovering and improving on the mechanisms that people use in their social interactions with one another – making rational decisions about which are still appropriate and which can be replaced by software or technology.
I have to think about this a bit more fully, but I’d appreciate any thoughts anyone might have…
So I’m sitting in the single bed that I sleep in when I’m visiting my family and the floor is covered in wrapped and half-wrapped presents and I’m trying to remember when I last had such a genuinely nice day. I woke up to hear my parents gently bickering with one another, and my mother’s frantic hoovering. But by the time I’d got downstairs, they were practically out of the door – off to do some Christmas shopping. My brother and I chatted for a while and then flicked through the vast amounts of music channels that Sky provides before finally assembling coats and gloves and going out ourselves…
Eleven-thirty and we’re wandering through John Lewis and Debenhams making rude comments about the slow people and the people with really bad hair. And we’re trying to think of presents for our mum and one of our grandparents and that particularly annoying cousin – and sneakily buying each other presents on the side when we think the other one is kind of looking away. And we find something really cheap in the sale at Habitat that we can give to that awkward person who’s impossible to buy for and it’s a complete fudge and we don’t care.
And then we go to the cinema – me swearing like a trooper at any car that tries to get in our way – my brother getting slightly over-excited. And we have to go to the top floor of the car-park where the light’s really bright and strong because there are so many other people around. And we’re going to see The Two Towers because we’ve both been excited about it forever and we go and see it and it’s pretty good but not as good as it should have been but we’re still kind of awed by the battle of Helm’s Deep.
And we’re driving home picking apart the bits of the film that we don’t like and we give it marks out of ten and then compare notes about the coolest characters and the biggest changes to the plot and the whether that character was taking the micky and whether Orcs should sound like characters from “On the Buses” and whether Ents would really be like that, and although we’re not sure that the film was as good as we would have liked, our conversation is probably better fun than any film could ever be.
Back at home mum and dad are grumbling at each other in a kind of amiable background noise kind of way, and they let my brother put on the cricket because he’s not at home that much and so can get away with murder. And we show them the presents we’ve bought other people and then I go and grab the cheese that I’d bought in London a couple of days previous from where it’s being stored in the cellar and we sit in front of the fire and open the packages one by one and everyone in the family sniffs them and makes appreciative noises.
And then my brother and I go upstairs with my mother and start wrapping up presents on my bedroom floor. My brother decides to tease my mother a bit and so I join in and it’s one of those occasions where if we got it slightly wrong we’d get lynched, but we didn’t so it was tremendously entertaining. And we’re looking through the presents that we bought for no one in particular and now have to decide who to give them too – like the Paul Auster book or the tiny bottle of lemon after-dinner liquer and trying to work out who would love a present like this, before my mum goes and finishes the toad in the hole while I’m checking my e-mail and then we all have a huge meal.
Whereupon my brother and I are abandoned in the sitting room with hundreds of TV channels and a roaring fire, and we watch loads of music videos and discuss the history of new metal and then watch Tom Green and Monica Lewinsky and then turn off all the downstairs lights and go to bed… What a nice day…
So today I received a packaged from Amazon which I thought was my Christmas shopping arriving, but it wasn’t. It was a gift for me from my wishlist. I haven’t opened it yet, but I don’t think it’s my Secret Santa because it looks quite big and expensive. Which makes me wonder, who was it? Did you send me a gift? If so let me know who you are (either now or after Christmas Day) so I can thank you. In the meantime, I hope everyone’s having a lovely run-up to Christmas…