January 2005 Archives
January 29, 2005
My favourite business card by about a mile
My idea of heaven
Spending a really golden morning with my 5 year-old daughter Billie (she's off school recovering from something called Winter Vomiting Virus – nice), reading stories, playing snakes & ladders, making a Balamory collage and listening to the really quite amazing Last FM.
January 28, 2005
A lot of ifs
If people of good will turn out to vote in large numbers. If courageous officials and volunteers can see election day through without chaos or fraud or a bloodbath. If candidates are not assassinated en masse once elected. If the Americans (and the British) can be trusted not to drop the Iraqi people like a stone in the post-election mess.
If ideologues on either side of the Atlantic (but mainly over there) can contain their infantile unipolar ardour and stay out of Iran (and Syria and North Korea...). If Iraq doesn't break into half-a-dozen pieces and go the way of Somalia or the Sudan. If the insurgents and opportunists and demagogues can be shown the value of a working democratic culture before they wreck the country. If the electricity and the water and the roads and the telephones and the schools work and keep working.
If Suni voters turn out at all. If the emerging Iraqi media can support the open debate necessary to grow a functioning post-Sadam society. If ordinary Iraqis have the heart to see the election as an opportunity to begin building a new society from scratch. If the elected representatives turn out to be good at the job (that's a pretty important one). If a real economy can be grafted onto the wrecked Iraqi infrastructure...
January 27, 2005
Not following nofollow
Ben Hammersley reckons Google's rel="nofollow" thingie is a bad thing and won't work anyway. I'm not sure I agree, at least not with the economics part. email spam is hard to discourage because it continues to produce the desired effect (clicks) in a cost-effective way despite pathetic response rates and increasingly effective filters. rel="nofollow" will kill comment spam (if widely adopted) because, in principle at least, there will be no point at all spamming blogs with links to your poker site once those links no longer boost Google pagerank.
Spammers may not be the kind of people you want in your hot tub but they are goal-oriented economic actors and they won't waste any time at all running comment scripts once they realise they are 100% useless. Having said that, I'm sympathetic to Ben's (and other people's) concerns about the potential damage to the semantic (and social) web that a new class of weighting for links might cause. We'll have to keep an eye on this one.
In the meantime, I'm sticking with a combination of MT-Blacklist, which works if you keep the blacklist up-to-date, and new kid MTCloseComments, which does something I've been whinging about for ages – it just closes comments once they're a certain age. Of course, MTCloseComments might also contain the seeds of the web's slow heat death but I can't imagine how – the only people who post comments to old entries here are spammers (except this one).
Xmas toys: good and bad. Number 4 - The Rainbow Art Set
Now this is rubbish. You had toys like this when you were a kid. It's an absolute classic I-want-one-of-those exploitation toy (toysploitation?). Paint colours that are supposed to stay separate and pristine mix to form... brown, the 'non-drip' brushes drip all over the place and are impossible to keep clean, colours are thin and nasty, the creative limitations of painting everything in rainbow colours soon become evident and, well... I hate it. A non-toy (as seen on TV).
January 25, 2005
How to throw away a natural advantage
The UK cable TV business is a uniquely dysfunctional family, managing to marry epic individual clumsiness with the kind of domestic chaos that continually threatens to bring the whole family down. Having (nearly) overcome the decades of forced disarray produced by its origin in dozens of separate, local companies, the industry's getting ready for another gigantic misstep – this time into Video on Demand (VoD).
I suppose, when you own a broadband pipe into every one of your customer's homes, the logic of VoD must be pretty compelling. It must also be immensely frustrating that, so long after Sky's arrival in the UK, the satellite firm still owns the multichannel marketplace despite the complete absence of a return path, no way of delivering Internet access or a phone line and the unavoidable requirement to fix a nasty wart to the side of every home covered.
Cable's response to Sky's continued dominance, perhaps understandably, is to push ahead with the medium's natural advantage and try to make a go of VoD (you can't do VoD without a network infrastructure and a proper return path so Sky just can't play). There is, presumably, a point some time in the future when owning a fast, two-way data path into every home finally pays off and cable comes into its own but, as far as I can see, you'd need to be criminally naive to think that that time has arrived. This is still very much Sky's market and the service of the moment is not VoD (or even NVoD – Near Video on Demand – which is a big hit on both Sky and3 cable) but Sky Plus.
The complete failure of the cable firms to roll out their own Personal Video Recorder (PVR) is perhaps partially explained by the announcement of their VoD plans but VoD won't come close to competing with Sky Plus (or even my five year-old Tivo) any time soon. By contrast, building a PVR for cable would have been a piece of cake – the technology is straightforward, the manufacturers ready and waiting and the kit cheaper than it's ever been. Rolling out PVRs into the cable network would be no more difficult than distributing, say, a new generation of remote controls. There'd be no impact on the infrastructure and hardly any CapEx – just a marketing and admin cost plus maybe some investment in an improved EPG (although I'm sure the Tivo people would be quite happy to share theirs). Sky has even done half the marketing job already – everyone knows what a PVR is now ("you know, the thing that lets you rewind live telly").
So, instead of taking the easy win and, not incidentally, boosting ARPU by taking an extra couple of hundred quid a year from PVR subscribers, the cable industry has, once again, chosen the rocky road of rolling out a new and expensive technology into a resistant marketplace while Sky continues to sell PVRs like ice creams in August. Oy.
More divas
Now I feel bad. I forgot to mention that, in the last few weeks we lost two of the most important Old School opera goddesses of all time: Victoria de los Angeles and Renata Tebaldi. In their native countries (Spain and Italy respectively) they were practically worshiped. They were contemporaries of Callas and of comparable stature. They're both in my record collection – de los Angeles on several super-cheap CDs probably given to me by my friend Paul who used to buy that sort of thing from a stall on Whitechapel Waste when he worked over the road at Eastside Books (her lovely Catalan songs seem to be unavailable but you can still get this fat collection of traditional Spanish song at amazon.co.uk) and Tebaldi on heavy vintage vinyl probably bought from the quite amazing and precious Harold Moore's Records in Great Marlborough Street when I worked next door at Marks and Spencer. Opera divas are no longer glamorous, remote figures, loved by millions from a distance – they're struggling to retain their relevance, losing a lot of weight (well, most of them), doing Reality TV shows and charity concerts. They should be a protected species.
January 24, 2005
Xmas toys: good and bad. number 3 - The Incredimobile RC car
This one looked unpromising. I don't need to tell you that 90% of movie tie-in toys are depressing play-once-and-discard rubbish and I found it difficult to believe that a plastic RC car could buck the trend (much as I loved The Incredibles) but, dear reader, I was wrong. It's chunky (doors close nicely, roof snaps on and off properly), it's well put together, quite fast and fun to play with – it comes with a nice bendy Mr Incredible toy and has good sounds too (although everything has good sounds these days doesn't it?). Oliver has played with it... ooh... ten times? Fifteen times? That makes it a big hit in our house.
And while you're thinking about it, tell me why this one is different. Can there really be two models? One for the US and one for Europe?
January 21, 2005
Divas
From the tenuous links dept. (Singers, women, National heroines...). Lovely, long, quite slow-paced and admiring portrait of Mali's Oumou Sangare from fan and world music expert Lucy Duran on Radio 3 at the weekend (yes, it'll probably be overwritten by next week's show so you should drop me a line if you want an MP3). And, if you're going CD shopping next weekend, remember that everything Kathleen Ferrier ever recorded is now out of copyright (she died in 1952) so you should be able to buy it all in really cheap new editions. This is what copyright time limits are for. The labels have had their fifty years to exploit the Ferrier catalogue and now it's someone else's turn. If we're not careful, record label whinging (remember the fuss about the fiftieth anniversary of Callas' 1953 Tosca?) is going to close off recent work like Ferrier's from the public domain forever.
January 19, 2005
eBay people
Like you (I assume), we spent a lot of money on eBay this Xmas – lots of cheap Lego and Hello Kitty and Geomag plus toys that were unobtainable in the shops. Let's face it, you can get anything on eBay (except a gun) but the experience is very different from shopping at John Lewis or from a catalogue. Why?
1. You'll get objectively better customer service. Everything comes the next day. If it doesn't come the next day you'll get a personally-addressed apologetic note and probably some kind of compensation.
2. A good eBay rating is a guarantee of good service. You can fake an eBay reputation but not a really good one. Buying something from an eBay seller with a rating of, say, 1,000+ will always be better than buying from M&S or John Lewis or [insert your customer service King here].
3. eBay sellers worry about customer service above all. You get exactly what you were expecting. Full stop. This turns out to be a phenomenally effective retail model and it means eBay sellers can stop worrying about other classical retail success factors like terms of trade and price.
4. eBay people are people people. Grumpy, impatient people needn't apply – they can't be bothered to lovingly package and despatch hundreds of low cost items, manage feedback and handle dozens of trivial customer queries. Only nice people do this, so buying something on eBay is almost always a pleasant experience.
Conventional retailers have to worry about a lot of factors: customer service (timeliness, courtesy, quality etc.), terms of trade (return policies etc.) and price (cheap or not) being the big three. eBay sellers worry only about customer service. Price is taken care of by the auction process and sellers' terms of trade are typically as tough as old boots. The lesson is simple: if your customer service is impeccable you don't need good terms of trade and price stops being the number 1 factor.
I find myself wondering whether real world retailers could benefit from adopting some of these uniquely eBay values. A clothing retailer who decided to fanatically over-deliver on customer service might, for instance, be able to toughen up on terms of trade and thus reduce the punishing cost of handling returned items. A supermarket who went customer service crazy might find a way out of the price crunch that threatens to wipe half of them out.
eBay sellers are telling retailers: if you invest more in really unflappable customer service you can toughen up those pussy-cat return policies and save a fortune. And, of course, it's more urgent than you think: a generation of eBay-literate customers is now saying: I'm not really bothered about your remedial, disaster recovery policies. I just want what I asked for.
January 18, 2005
Yodeling for pleasure
Lots of infectious laughter in Sandy Toksvig's programme about yodeling on Radio 4 last weekend. The thesis: yodeling cheers you up. I can't help but agree. My iTunes library contains 28 songs with the word 'yodel' in the track name ('Yodeling Hobo', 'Swiss Yodel', 'Yodeling Cowboy', 'The Whipporwill Yodel' and so on... Please don't judge me – I had a difficult childhood). I can't yodel (can you?) but I'm adding it to the list of things I'd like to learn how to do when I'm old (I suppose I mean 'older').
This file will, predictably, be overwritten by next week's show so drop me a line if you'd like an MP3.
Evidence Schmevidence
Pols of various complexions have embraced something called 'evidence-based' policy lately. Evidence-based policy is supposed to be more rational, closer to the cool, double-blind, statistically-valid world of scientific experiment (the phrase comes from medicine).
The evidence so far, though, is that evidence is always going to come second to cheap political 'hot buttons'. The evidence: the Government's clever-looking, income-linked fines – which promise to hit the criminal rich with larger fines than the cheeky chavs – is an almost perfect clone of a failed policy the Tories called 'unit fines' in 1992. Kenneth Clark quietly dropped the policy in... er... 1993 when they were shown to be unfair, unpopular and unenforceable.
Will Labour's unit fines survive the upcoming general election campaign? Unlikely. I'll bet you a tenner the scheme is buried by Easter. The evidence is pouring in, though: politicians can't adapt to the more open, networked, media-saturated, post-democratic era that produced the desire to ground policy in reality in the first place. Cheesy political posturing will persist. Real evidence will continue to be ignored.
January 16, 2005
Sounds from another world
No point taking a microphone to space. No sound in a vacuum. In thirty years of increasingly hyper-real media coverage of space exploration we've never, ever heard space. Just those crackly radio transmissions across the void (and all those made up noises in Sci-Fi movies). That's what makes these sounds, the first ever recorded on another world, so mind-blowing.
The picture is a 360° composite taken during the descent at about 8km from the surface. There are many more images at the ESA's Cassini-Huygens web site.
January 15, 2005
What are we to do with poor Prince Harry?
Simple: vote him out (shouldn't be any difficulty securing the nominations from his equally barmy housemates) and replace him with Kenzie.
Podcasting Saturn
You've got to love Radio 4's brilliant Cassini-Huygens total immersion radio experience. Listen to this lot and you'll know about as much as a grown-up with a day job should reasonably know about Saturn and the extraordinary Cassini-Huygens mission . There's a Real stream of an excellent half hour documentary called Running Rings Around Saturn that went out last week and, if you scroll down to the bottom of the page, you'll find an hour of extended interviews with the three principle scientists interviewed for the programme, one of whom, John Zarnecki, has been working on the mission for the whole of its 17 year life.
Cassini-who?
It's midnight GMT. What are you watching? On Channel 4, Jackie Stalone is out of the house. On BBC 2 Cassini's baby Huygens (after a 3 billion kilometre flight) has arrived on Titan's surface. I learn from the Open University's terrifically enthusiastic coverage that that surface is hard – perhaps clay or frozen snow. Photos during Huygens' descent suggest there may be an ocean and water courses, sonar says there's some high cloud, surface images show boulders or snowballs. Holy shit.
The bit that, as usual, humbles me most: the scientists who have worked for 17 years for a two-and-a-half hour mission. Right now, they're skipping around the ESA's control room like my kids. The guy who spent twelve years working on the force meter (an instrument whose working life, now over, amounted to one twentieth of a second) says the data so far shows a surface like 'creme brulee' (crunchy on top, soft underneath). The imaging guy is desperate to get back to the 300 or so pictures Huygens was able to return via its one working radio channel – so far he's seen only ten. I'm speechless, really.
January 14, 2005
Xmas toys: good and bad. Number 2 - The Playmobil Airliner
Engineered like a Mercedes, the Playmobil Airliner is really a parent's toy. Everything snaps together with the kind of satisfying click that only the Germans can manage. The thing comes with a tiny plastic and steel tool that looks like it belongs in the boot of an SL. The interior has cup holders with stacking cups and a proper, scary-looking German stewardess. The design is spartan European and hyper-detailed – nothing is half done, flashy or unsatisfactory. Playmobil is Lego for anal retentives (although, I suppose, Lego is Lego for anal retentives...). Anyway, less is more.
January 12, 2005
Nanotech
I defy you to find a better layman's summary of Nanotech (science and business) than The Economist's terrific survey from last week (The Economist's well-researched monthly surveys are probably the best reason to sort out a subscription to the magazine sharpish, if you ask me).
January 11, 2005
Take my wife...
Juliet (who is my wife) is blogging Celebrity Big Brother entertainingly over at bird.co.uk (right now she's struggling to find the words to sum up Germaine's departure) and she's asked me to let you know that there is an alternative to the kind of meagre, dry stuff you politely put up with here at bowblog.
January 10, 2005
Xmas toys: good and bad. Number 1 - Geomag Panels
How's this for topical? A Xmas entry in mid-January! Every year we buy a small mountain of toys for our children and about half of them turn out to be total rubbish. Of the rest, though, several always turn out to be real gems and I feel it's my solemn duty to let you know which ones have kept me the kids amused in the critical post-Xmas fortnight and which are already down at the hospice shop.
We're already Geomag fans round here (they seem to have a cult following and many imitators) so we were pretty excited when they launched a line of little plastic panels in various shapes to snap into your magnetic constructions. These panels are very simple but really add to the pleasure of assembling the fantastically chunky, snappy, clicky Geomag rods and balls into pointless geometric shapes.
This is an impossibly satisfying toy, providing the kind of fingertip pleasure you just can't get from Stickle Bricks. The plastic-coated Geomag rods are North-South magnets that you 'stick' together or join using shiny, nickel balls to form intricate, self-supporting, 3D structures. These panels allow you to give your skeletons lovely translucent walls and edges and fins and windows. Neat.
January 07, 2005
Keane on Keane
When I was young and a bit scary-looking I used to hitch-hike round the West of Ireland and I once spent a couple of nights in a small town in deepest Kerry called Listowel. I went there because I'd read some plays and stories by a funny and clever and sentimental writer called John B. Keane (the Irish Dylan Thomas if you ask me). Keane, I knew, kept a pub in the town (called, as you'd expect, John B. Keane's).
I arrived in town on the last night of an amateur run of one of Keane's plays (I wish I could remember which one) in a freezing church hall. I saw the play (laughed like a drain) and then went back to Keane's pub for what turned out to be the private cast party. I have no idea how I got in but it's a proper testament to the generosity of the Irish (and their unwillingness to mix it with a twenty year-old spotty skin-head in camouflage and ten-hole Martens) that I didn't learn it was a private party until I read the notice on the front door on the way out.
In fact, I had a lovely evening, got a bit drunk, talked for ages with the man himself and felt privileged to be included in a quite sophisticated, quite introverted, quite alien, provincial bubble – a community that, back then, before EU money translated the whole of Ireland into Barcelona or Helsinki or Toulouse or somewhere, seemed like the very final edge of the European literary universe – what with The Atlantic and all that.
Anyway, twenty years later, I learn that Fergal Keane, BBC foreign correspondent and dreadful romantic, is John B's nephew. He's made a nice radio programme about his uncle (who died in 2002) which gave me goose-bumps – memories crowding in and the voice of the man himself and his friends – literary and otherwise – and the rush of the River Feale and Keane's friendly pub and the modest, undemonstrative fame of the local hero. Excellent.
January 05, 2005
Let's hear it for 40-ish blokes
My wife is always telling me that our generation is now in charge. Although I seldom, these days, feel very in charge (I'm doing my best, though. Me: "yes. It is bed time. No you cannot watch another ten minutes of Inspector Gadget..."), I can see what she means.
On the radio last night, there were two really inspiring programmes from men of my 40-ish generation: Jon Ronson on... Going West (one of a very clever series) and Simon Armitage's one-off Surtsey and Me about the strange volcanic island off Iceland with which he (almost) shares a birthday.
January 04, 2005
New year's resolution: unload that big pile of review copies
Here's a list of geeky books I've currently got for sale over at amazon.co.uk. Go on. Buy some. They're all brand new and every single one is cheaper than you'll get it anywhere else – sometimes four or five pounds less than amazon.co.uk. I've highlighted the ones I think are really good in bold (that doesn't mean I understand them).
You can also get an up-to-date list of things I'm selling here any time (I think).
January 03, 2005
Congratulations, scumbags
Today, for the first time, I deleted over 1,000 spam comments from this weblog (about 1,200 in the last 24 hours, in fact). I am now officially overwhelmed (and so is poor Robin's server which now spends most of its time accepting and then deleting my comment spam) so we're going to have to try a different way of dumping the spam – probably something that requires commentors to type a random code or something. How boring.