You can shove your iPhone up your UMPC

I want one of these.
Ok, so it doesn't appear to have HSDPA -- unlike my current mobile phone -- but it's running a proper OS on a tiny machine that you can then plug into a keyboard, screen, mouse. It's a better spec. than my laptop but would fit in an albeit large pocket.
You'll probably need large pockets to pay for it, as previous models in this range have been c. £1,000, but since Sony have given this UMPC the same model name as a camcorder, it ain't easy to find the price on the web.

It's not just their tails that they lose...

What happens if you give an iguana Viagra and it overdoses? The Belgians seem to have found out.

A white Christmas?

As temperatures drop to brass monkey levels, the chance of snow lingers, just in time for our company Christmas party this Friday! So it could be a white Christmas after all...
Why are we having a Christmas party in January? It's not calendar iconoclasm (more's the pity). The official line is that when we merged this year, we couldn't anticipate how big the company would be when booking a venue. The real reason is a combination of tight-fistedness and incompetence. We always knew the merger was happening, but didn't book anything early enough and balked at the prices of the venues that remained.
I'm steadily beginning to appreciate the gap between brewery and piss-up in the merged company's competencies. Example.
I've been trying to push an internal knowledge management initiative. We were almost ready to launch a new portal providing access to all our documents and people in time for the aforementioned Christmas party.
Then "technical support" got their mitts on it.
Their contribution was to:

1. switch the domain name settings so now a quarter of the staff can't access it;
2. move a third of all our documentation to a new file server without telling anyone; it then broke and it'll take 4-6 weeks to fix.

The adage of "if it ain't broke" rarely applies to the systems administrator mentality. But it appears here that the idea of fixing broken things doesn't apply either.
*** Updated ***
And there's still more... having sent the content authors a user guide telling them how to add content, one has now come back telling me that some people can't see the content he's entered. Did he enter it into the portal? No. What am I meant to do with these people?

Yet another take on Big Brother

Amid the media frenzy elicited by journos' attempts to provide ever more insightful (and inciting) commentary on racism in Big Brother -- and it is unquestionably racist -- haven't we lost sight of a fundamental problem with this sort of media?
So she's getting paid to appear on the show and should've had some idea of what she might be in for, but this is TV based on abuse. Channel 4 and Endemol do themselves and their audience great discredit by continuing to broadcast this shit. What sort of sadism is this? Are people really entertained by watching someone be abused in this way? I'm not surprised that they've been so many complaints.
Of course you can try to justify some aspects of this broadcast: racism is now (temporarily, I'm sure) top of the tabloid agenda, while the show is exposing issues we have in the country as a whole which we rarely want to face up to.
But remember that the whole point about racism is that it's not just the individual in the direct line of fire who is suffering abuse. There's collateral damage to everyone who's visibly ethnically different and who has experienced similar behaviour.
The broadcasters, by not even warning the offenders over their behaviour are condoning it, almost certainly for the sake of money. It's a slap in the face for an audience presumed to be psychotic voyeurs, and a kick in the teeth for anyone who hates racism.

Unbearable?

Quick update: an amusing story that could be serious... be sure to check out the video link.

Premise of innocence

I don't want to always whinge about stuff, but isn't there a worrying tendency for the erosion of justice going on? Just take a look at how the government now wants to seize people's assets and place them under house arrest in case they commit a crime; and if that doesn't disturb you, just think of the children!

In ourselves we trust

All right, so this is a little old, but the trends identified in the Edelman Trust Barometer are still worth considering and point to how information will be received in 2007.
The biggest finding of the Trust report -- and it's a continuing trend -- is that people have confidence in people like them rather than subject experts. This explains a lot about trends relating to how content is presented both on the web and in other media:

• Increasing use of folksonomy-led news-sharing sites like del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, Furl, or Clipmarks; i.e. what people call Web 2.0.


• The emphasis that all media are placing on User Generated Content (UGC) and blogs. Newspapers are relying on columnists who fill space in the demotic of their readership, while TV programmers believe that serious issues need to be commented on and even fronted by their audience, or people like their audience: witness Panorama dropping Robin Day / Dimbleby-like figures of austere knowledge giving way to more vox pop features where people complain about how difficult some part of their life is and demonstrate little hard evidence.


• Why Jeremy Vine's radio show is the worst piece of broadcasting you can imagine: the least-informed sections of society rant about irrelevant matters, interspersed with horrendous middle-of-the-road music.

There's good reason for promoting the people like me angle: you can develop a sense of community, foster ground-up collaboration that business in particular often loses out on, and target relevant markets more effectively. There is one big drawback however: people who are ignorant will increasingly rely on other people who share similar, comforting ignorance, as Richard Dawkins points out.
There's a reason people are experts: they've invested heavily in discovery and have demonstrated a talent for it in their particular area. If we just trust people like me, we risk stagnating in a stew of ignorance and self-righteousness.
And yes, I am aware of the irony of how this has been communicated.

The final straw in the GM debate?

Through a GM process, a food technology company in the States has managed to turn celery into a "tweaked" straw, allowing you to add to the taste of a Bloody Mary.
Take a closer look...