Category: Random

3.30am Finally go to bed. Have been working for fourteen hours with only an hour break for Celebrity Big Brother. Autopsies have gone on in the background. 6.45am Alarm goes off. Get up, shower, shove loads of files online, check e-mail. 7.30am Leave flat. 8.10am Fight through rain and buses – arrive at work, print out loads of things. Twitch. 8.50am Leave for Holborn tube, run to get onto train. Fall over, hurt leg. 9.00am Bakerloo line not working. Get out and catch bus. 9.30am Arrive at Paddington for ten o’clock train. 10.10am Train still not boarding… 12.00pm Train supposed to arrive in Cardiff. 12.45pm Train arrives in Cardiff. 1.10pm Arrive at BBC Cardiff. 2.00pm Start presentation. 3.30pm Finish presentation. 4.00pm Leave BBC Cardiff. 4.50pm Train leaves for Paddington. 7.00pm Train arrives at Paddington. 7.30pm Arrive home. Sit in dumb, slack-jawed silence watching Home Front in the Garden in my overcoat. 9.00pm Write blog-entry.

Further to my post earlier today, I’ve decided to release an only mostly-finished article I’ve been writing about the ways in which Apple computers seem to me to be almost facilitating piracy – and in my opinion rightly so… Please forgive me if it seems slightly hackneyed and if you find any blatant inaccurracies or spelling mistakes mail me and I’ll correct them immediately…

Apple and the Pirate Everyman
“Don’t Steal Music” says the sticker on every new iPod. But is Apple being disingenuous? Because no other platform in recent history has done as much to help information (and entertainment media) to be easy to create, copy or disseminate…

I’ve read two articles today about the ways in which the entertainment industry is interacting with computing and the internet – and unsurprisingly both touch on issues of piracy. The first article (Fox Exec wants help ending piracy) is about Peter Chernin’s upcoming speech at Comdex. He’s expected to argue that restricting the reproduction of copyrighted materials to end piracy would also reinvigorate the tech economy. The other article (Online casting calls snub Apple) is from c|net and is about the way in which media and entertainment companies are passing the Mac platform by in favour of the wider distribution of Windows-based technology. And here’s a quote from Apple themselves:

Apple’s Schiller said the company is not concerned about losing out on the next generation of digital media services, noting that current industry-approved offerings are barely out of the gate while others are on thin ice legally. “We don’t want to evangelize products that encourage illegal behavior,” he said.

If you don’t mind me saying so (and I hope you’ll forgive me for being so harsh) both of these people – Schiller and Chernin alike – are talking absolute and total bollocks. In fact it’s never been clearer that in terms of conventional models, the entertainment industry and the computing industry are working directly at loggerheads here. Piracy in its current form is both the result of, and increases to be promoted by, rapid technological take-up and change. The desire to download a movie or a selection of MP3s is one of the things that lies directly behind the popularisation and take-up of broadband technologies, and everyone knows it. Similarly burning music, storing music, playing good quality entertainment products – all require decent hardware, and moreover encourage the purchasing of more or higher quality hardware by bringing the computer in to an ever more central entertainment role in the home. Who do they think they’re kidding?

Meanwhile Apple claim to be avoiding encouraging illegal behaviour? Then why have they made an entire operating system and way of interacting with media products that has made illegal behaviour – or to put it another way, behaviour that is not copyright-centred – easier than ever before? It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever…

Never let it be said that Bill Gates has lost his touch. I mean certainly the man responsible for Windows and Office can’t really be blamed for the fact that everyone hates his company. Nor is he directly responsible for the X-box not selling at all. Nor indeed can he be held to account for completely not noticing the potential of the internet. No, I think it’s clear that Gates is a man with a mission – a true visionary genius. Which is why I’m prepared to forgive his obsession with the tablet PC and celebrate instead the concept that will take the Western World firmly into the 21st – maybe even the 22nd – century: Smart Fridge-Magnets!

I knew it had a name – and I’ve been trying to remember what that name was for years. I’ve asked friends, family, professionals, experts – but evidently my friends and family weren’t studying rhetoric and the experts and professionals were experts and professionals in completely the wrong fields. But I now know the name for the rhetorical trope where you mention by omission (“I won’t mention the prime minister’s predeliction for brandy – or bring up (yet again) the chancellor’s fetish for ladies underwear”), and that name is… paralepsis. [Find out more about rhetoric]

So I’m wandering through my referrers and I come across an exact replica of all the content of my site only on livejournal. And I think to myself – why that’s a little strange. And it has comments, which my site doesn’t. So in many ways it’s actually better. It’s been pulled out of my RSS feed as far as I can tell. I wonder – is this automation happening with other people as well? And who is the sinister presence behind the scenes that pulls the strings? Update: What a funny old world – Culprit / Punter found and all is well with the world…

This might come as a bit of a shock to some of you, so sit yourselves down. From the book of Internet Revelations: “It is possible for a website to have a function to users above and beyond the making of interesting or pretty graphs out of its usage statistics”.

Three comments about films…

• So I went to see Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets with Cal a couple of days ago. It’s kind of a complicated story as to how that ended up happening. It certainly wasn’t planned. It’s far from an awful film, but it’s far from brilliant either. The special effects are pretty stunning – considerably better than in the first film – but the pacing is leaden, the characterisation pretty slapdash and threadbare and, well, it’s still a bit long… It’s worth seeing, but don’t get too excited…
• Harry Potter’s length might have been a disappointment, but I went and bought the extended DVD of Lord of the Rings [US | UK] a few days ago, and that’s substantially better than the film that was shown in the cinema. It’s a full half an hour longer than the theatre version – mostly exposition and character-development – and it feels substantially richer and you feel more invested in it as a result. Most interestingly, I think, it exposes how odd the pacing was on the theatrical version, particularrly in the Cate Blanchett / Lothlorien episode…
• While we’re talking filmic nonsense, I’ve put a very old review of The Patriot online – mainly because I was talking to Meg about the film yesterday and because it’s such a revisionist piece of crap that someone has to stand up and be counted and say so…

Well it’s swiftly approaching that time of the year again – and that means it’s time for Cal, Denise and I to throw open the doors of Secret Santa 2002!

“The idea of Secret Santa is very simple – you pull a name out of a hat and buy that person a present. Your name is in the hat as well, so someone buys you a present too! Everyone gets a present! Everyone’s happy!”