Year: 2003

This is probably well known by now, but according to a friend of mine who is still trying to work out whether to get the 12″ or 15″ Apple Powerbook, he’s been advised by a man he talked to at a London Apple Centre that a 15″ variety will take longer to be delivered because Apple have accepted there’s a problem with the screen getting brighter spots on it. Apparently they’ve definitely ceased production while they look into it. This is probably extremely good news for those of us who have a Powerbook with this problem, and it might explain why I have still not received my return voucher, over a week and a half after I rang them up. I’ll be checking up on this later, but I thought I should probably share the news. If anyone has more information on the subject, please feel free to add links in the comments.

Watching the Baghdad Blogger on Newsnight this evening has been a vaguely dispiriting experience. It’s not entirely clear what his remit was or what the circumstances of the film were, but it looks like he was given a camera and very little support and left to try and drag a film together. The idiom was very webloggery – insight into the individual’s life and background blurring into commentary on life in Iraq. As an approach I think it’s very powerful – the most startling moment for me was his mother talking about watching Pop Idol and realising (yet again) how similar and connected we all are – but the implementation was terrible and – I fear – a bit embarrassing. The whole thing felt – yet again – like one of those blurred confusions between webloggery and journalism that journalists keep making that always seems to come out slightly badly for the bloggers concerned. Or maybe I’m being a little unfair…

Some of the things I’m thinking about at the moment – at work and not at work – that I’m having real trouble articulating for some reason but that maybe I can do something with if I set some of them free:

• Collaborative online experiences for friends, small groups, one-on-one interactions – going places to do things with friends, co-browsing, co-experiencing, what it’s like being at the cinema with a friend, backgrounded/instinctual non-verbal communications, presence-and-flocking, hello, Non-stranger-spaced, non-subject-focused discussions, tiny permeable-membrane reducers, three degrees;
• Routinely time-shifted media, ubiquities of recording and collation technologies, “Death of live”, time-based design and the end of time-based content, programming in the middle of the night is as important as during the middle of the day, navigating insane scheduling information, worn paths, distribution technologies, bittorrent;
• Simplicities of structures, metadatas, identifiers, organisational principles, multi-use tags, clumpings, technological strata versus social orders;
• Leaderships, relationships, political managements, social engagement as game, rules of games, message-boards as prime structural spaces to test political systems, American free-market reputation economies, capturing ill-formed relationships, alpha behaviour, dominance, leadership, leader-led vs. leader-less groups;
• Information in the air, tiny LCD screens, scrolling data printed on milk-cartons, teddy bears that react to the weather, Ceefax, smoke-alarms, application-updates through the radio…

Gah. I can’t think properly. Too much stuff piling up unexpressed. Too many things I’m not expressing properly. Too many opportunities not to produce stuff of suitable quality and value.

Half-Klimt (one, two, three), half-Rothko (one, two, three) – I know they’ve been everywhere, but they’re so bloody beautiful: Every Playboy Centrefold: The Decades. There’s something so elusive and gestural about them – and the traces of writing and iconography lingering around the bodies just makes the whole thing seem even less to do with flesh and still more numinous.

The same artist achieved similar effects with a triptych of stills of late night chat-show presenters and used the same process on images of homes for sale, which is equally breath-taking.

Omigod. I completely forgot my weblogging birthday on Saturday. This site has now been going for a full four years and two days. Four years and two days of almost daily pre-fabricated, disposable weblogging goodness. That’s one thousand four hundred and sixty three days since I started weblogging. Worse still – that’s three thousand nine hundred and forty nine posts. An average of 2.7 posts per day. Dear God. When will it end? Will I never tire of writing this crap? In twenty years, will I have an Established 1999 sign out front? Will I be in total information capturing mode as I’m shoved into an old folks home? Will there be a bloody keyboard in my grave? Will the first thing that happens in Atheist Heaven be that some crotchetty old bastard with a toothless smile hands me an ethereal laptop with spiritual-fidelity wireless soulnet access before demanding that I write something pithy about halos?

Central London’s bus routes have a new feature – small machines that you must buy your ticket from before they will let you embark. They have two particularly interesting features. Firstly they are the least well-designed / usable ticket machines I’ve ever seen, with the buttons that you are forced to press before you pay placed (cunningly) about half a foot below the place where you put the money in. So you see loads of people putting in money and then pressing buttons and looking a bit blank when they should be doing it the other way around. They form in little clots around the machines and make it impossible for everyone else who isn’t quite as dumb to pay for a ticket before the bus moves off. It’s very frustrating.

The other significant feature is equally annoying. The accursed machines are just too easy for people to game. Every single machine I use on a regular basis is clogged up with money at least twice a week. The reason? There’s a guy who roams up and down Oxford Street, putting in sticking and/or clogging-up substances (gum, maybe?) into the paying slot. He then waits for the money to build up and then comes along later in the day to harvesting the machines of lovely lovely cash. I have lost several pounds to this nefarious prankster. He is … objectionable … in my sight.

Anyway – yesterday I got to the bus stop, put in a pound, pressed the button (wrong order again, dammit, bloody machines), then pressed the eject button and then the proper button (first this time, good Tom) and capped it all off with the insertion of a nice round pound-coin. And what response did I get? Nothing. So I pressed the ‘eject money’ button once more. Nothing. So then I thumped it with my fist… And… Jackpot! Five shiny pounds clang down into the tray at the bottom. I am rich! My bus ticket karma is strong and I have been rewarded!

One stop later and the world finds equilibrium. Two people get on the bus without tickets. They want to get off again and buy tickets while the bus waits. The bus driver is understandably cross and refuses to let them do this as the ticket machine process is long and complex. They refuse to get out. Everyone on the bus shouts at them. Even I shout at them which is a surprise (I don’t shout at people much in public – only at the infestation of charity workers that colonise Central London). But they won’t get off. They say they’ve been waiting for half an hour. Everyone on the bus says they were waiting for half an hour too thank you very much. After ten minutes of stand-off, I get off the bus, buy them both tickets, thrust them in their hands, give them a piece of my mind about their behaviour (I’m becoming my mother) and sit down again on my seat. But they throw their tickets on the floor, the bus driver refuses to let them stay on board, the police arrive and then finally they get dragged off – possibly (for all I know) to Colditz or Alcatraz. At the next stop, almost exactly the same thing happens again! Again! Would you believe it! Another clump of people sans tickets, poncing around and shouting at the bus driver, causing a big stink and being unreasonable. Only this time I’m wise to their tricks. No buying people tickets for no good reason for me… Oooooh no… Not me.

And so time passes and we can finally see the great plan of the karmic network in its totality. For my extra four pounds that appeared from nowhere, I must pay two back and suffer over half an hour in delays. This is my destiny and I embrace it grudgingly. The world is a complex, intricate, designed place. And those bloody bus ticket machines are right at the heart of it…

So there’s an article about the BBC’s iCan project over at Wired.com: BBC Offers Power to the People. It’s an interesting, if slightly frustrating piece, for a whole range of reasons, but there’s one misconception that I think needs to be cleared up.

“In addition to finding the iCan issues a bit trivial, Kirkcaldy, a 20-year-old antiwar activist, doubts the BBC’s ability, as a government-owned entity, to objectively manage the site’s issues.”

The BBC very clearly and very much is not owned by the government. It’s an organisation originally created by a conglomerate of wireless manufacturers supported by a license fee that gave it financial independence from the Government that was given a royal charter in 1927. From that point onwards it has been answerable in principle only to the British people via the Board of Governors who are appointed to act as trustees for the public interest – ensuring it’s accountable and independent.

That’s not to deny that the BBC has a relationship with government – because members of the Board of Governers are appointed by the Queen under recommendation from the Prime Minister of the day. And the Government has a certain amount of power over the BBC – they approve the level of the license fee for a start (but are in no way responsible for its collection) – but there’s a very specific piece of legislation that guarantees editorial independence that should be evident to anyone who has seen the recent spat between the Labour government and the BBC.

If you’re sufficiently interested, there’s a great deal of information about the history of the BBC online as well as about how and why it operates.