Charge your iPod, blow your mind

I love this. When are you most likely to make use of solar power? When you're sunbathing. So now you can charge all your USB-driven devices (maybe even a solar fan) with zero-carbon while tanning your hide.
I guess oil is used to produce the bikini however.
Also, if everyone switches to powering their gadgets through sustainable energy, will this reduce global warming and thus reduce sunbathing opportunities, so making this product less effective?

It's a mashed up world out there

This blog is turning into yet another whinge about work: YAWAW, or YAWN. It was never meant to be. So let me pretend that I'm saying something wider about society and the internet rather than just about my terrible employers.
If you're into things webby, you'll almost certainly have read about if not actually read Tim O'Reilly's call for (self-)censorship, which has made the headlines in a number of places. I think what's shocked the internet community is that someone with as much understanding of the web should advocate this approach, when the whole strength of the web has been its liberalism; I use the term with all its implicitly positive and negative connotations.
Generally the internet has grown because it is innovative and free form, permitting the majority of people with the financial means to post content little hindrance to do so. There are of course exceptions, but generally this liberalism has led to rapid innovation of diversity of content, business models and technology. This is particularly in evidence in the much rehashed concept of Web 2.0. Such innovation creates issues for the politically reactionary, but few in our industry would have expected Tim O'Reilly to form part of that group.
You wouldn't expect the leading internet agency in Europe to form part of that group either, but an email to staff suggests otherwise:

[We] have been asked to attend a brainstorming seminar at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office on April 19th to explore the subject of how digital media can be used to defend against radicalisation.

The FCO tells us:

Groups such as Al Qaeda use the Internet and other communication media to great effect for propaganda and recruitment purposes.

Leaving aside my doubts about how much Al Qaeda is a cohesive group that distributes mass email and uploads photos of insurgent activities onto Flickr or terrorist mash-ups onto Facebook, let's just consider the company's reaction. It accepts without question that radicalisation is wrong and that the internet should be used to control it, then seeks to engage staff in telling the government why. So we're telling the government how to censor ourselves (coz they sure as hell don't know) while we tell our clients about how radical our thinking is in providing innovative solutions on the internet. We're provocative, we are. You can be too. Unless you're doing something that's not right. We'll be the judge of that though. So, we can create Web 2.0 style forums and develop some of the biggest mash-ups in the UK, but we're in favour of censorhip. That's because we're ethical. But we can still build sites for arms and cigarette manufacturers.
Wow, it's a complex world out there.

Hiding my glee

Do you judge people by the company they keep?

I've set up my own today, which implies:
1. I'm leaving my current company, which is deeply patronising.
2. I've won some business!

I have to hide my glee as I'm still in dispute with my current employers, but I'm over the bloody moon.

In case you need to get from Standford to Stockholm

Google advise on travelling from California to Sweden. Check out direction number 33.

Expert, schmexpert

Here are the categories for our new company expert programme:

1. Multi Channel e.g. IPTV, Mobile, Tablet PCs


2. Emerging Technologies eg, Vista, Ruby on Rails


3. Transactional Merchandising


4. Social Computing & Networking


5. Convergence


6. Youth Market & Online behaviour


7. New Online Business Models


8. Information Management, Enterprise Search & Dashboards


9. Rich Media


10. Inclusive Design


11. Youth trends

These are the subjects where my company sees itself at the forefront of thought and wants to produce a PowerPoint each quarter to prove it.
Some notable absences from the list: content management, systems integration, CRM, business process improvement, scalability and performance, security. What I'd call the fundamentals.
I have two main issues with the list: firstly, there's no place for me to show expertise unless I appropriate information management as being a broader understanding of content management (which it isn't really) and secondly, it's so bloody assumptive. If you're some kind of futurologist determining strategy and saying these are the things we should be interested in, why do you assume dashboards are going to be valuable, when all the current user research shows how much people hate adopting them? And why are Tablet PCs in there? Is the act of clicking on a website with a pen on a tablet radically different to using a mouse with a laptop? Why are multi-channel and convergence different subjects? Why are youth trends and youth market separate?
Then there's the final issue, which is that for each subject, the company is going to nominate four experts from different streams to contribute their expertise. How can you talk about new business models and about social networking and then prescribe who you define as an expert? Have these people never heard of wikis? Oh yes, they tried to implement a wiki but failed to grasp the fundamental concepts: there are 19 company wikis, where you can't add documents, can't use HTML and which can't be searched across. Nice.

How long to hack into your personal data?

Interesting table showing how long it takes to hack a password. I'll be changing all of mine to 9 characters mixed case, I think...

Time recovery

Fed up with having lost an hour's sleep at the weekend? Take a look at the benefits of power napping.

Snippets of apocrypha

I don't drink alcohol much anymore these days, but I recognise that some people are still susceptible to hangovers. Where are they going wrong? Should they be drinking a pint of water before they go to bed or making themselves curried scrambled eggs when they get up the next afternoon? No, these are myths, in comparison with the hangover cure pillow. It appears that all you need to stand bright lights and loud noises are some Himalayan herbs wrapped in cotton.

On a separate, similarly mythical note, I refer you to a story which is quite feasible, given how much money Alen Boksic used to earn.

Six degrees of refrigeration

Today, the maximum temperature is 9 degrees Celsius. The average temperature is considerably lower than that, around 6 degrees. But I'm sat in my corridor at my new permanent seat with no heating to speak of and no insulation save a broken glass panel above my head that's covered with a bit of cardboard box. How can this be an appropriate working environment by anyone's judgement? Must stop now as my fingers are seizing up... (No, that's not an exaggeration.)

Just desserts

The Football Association has expressed its dismay that a Tottenham fan managed to get close enough to Frank Lampard last night to aim a punch at him. Interestingly, this is closer than Emmanuel Adebayor got and he still got a four-match ban. So what retribution should we take against this hooligan? He's going to get a lifetime ban from White Hart Lane, which is surely a blessing rather than a punishment. If he'd actually hit Lampard he should have got a medal.