big papery thing tied up with string

November 30, 2010 — Si

As noted in an earlier episode, I love books. Or I thought I did. Now I’m wondering if I actually like well-edited prose in the palm of my hand and I just got confused. I’m just starting to twig there might be a viable alternative in the form of e-books.

I know what you are thinking: e-books aren’t real. They’re ghostly, massless substitutes for books. Real books can be tossed about, lent, and displayed as testaments to accrued wisdom and badges of affinity. Yet I can imagine similar objections to the innovation of the pulped wood printing: Made out of paper? What if it gets wet? Won’t the goat eat it? Paper tears – it doesn’t wear! Stick to tablets!

A more serious consideration is the reading ‘experience’. I’m not a fan of reading off a laptop for whatever reason but have no problem with a smartphone and an iPad. And anyone who thinks that the latest Kindle is not for the serious reader needs to shut up and go play with one right now.

Book ownership is like gym membership: there’s no point having it if it’s inaccessible. I always have my phone with me (and usually my iPad) so can whip it out and dip into that awesome book instead of checking Facebook for the latest Farmville stats. When I switch devices, it knows where I got up to – no more bus ticket bookmarks! I can annotate and highlight passages without feeling guilty and, intriguingly, see which passages make popular highlights. Most importantly, I can read in bed without getting out to turn out the light.

End result: more reading and that can’t be bad.

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the end of jobs

July 30, 2010 — Si

The history of progress is a long list of people of losing their jobs. From farm workers, typing pools, messengers, coal men: you name it, some pesky innovation has come and made the human redundant.

Yet the population remains employed, by and large. The grandsons of blacksmiths become mechanics, cobblers to surf-boarders, typesetters to WordPress themers.

Technology relieves the human of the mundane, repetitive and physical work compelled by economics. Services and products get cheaper which makes everyone gets relatively richer to how they were. New product and services become viable.

Career-wise, the best escape from this logical encroachment is to head for the high ground of human creativity, rich interaction – anything with soul that cannot be automated or mass-produced. Anything else will be available so easily to be virtually free.

The safe money, following the wobbly arc of this logic, is on the wranglers of the intangible: artists, poets, philosophers, gurus and the like. Those not inclined this way will still be able to live in far greater comfort than is typical today, free to pursue whatever happens to take their interest. Historical quirks may have us calling them students.

History also suggests that once physical and leisure needs are amply met there’s a thirst for status, respect and possibly fame. This is a conundrum. Everyone might have 3 hour working weeks and personal Nutri-Matic drinks synthesizer but not everyone can be famous: it’s a limited resource.

People will scrabble for attention and recognition, awarding themselves titles, honours and distinctions until someone conceives a mirror which gives everyone the impression they are top of the heap. Then we are done.

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invent this please

June 3, 2010 — Si

In case anyone feels like making a billion quid and eliminating some pathetic gripes of privileged whiners like myself, here are a couple of things that you could bestow to the world.  No charge.

Flip-up cycle extremities

I don’t need my bike to collapse to the size of a lunch box and I don’t want to hang it up like some kind of piece of theatre but I would like it to take up less space when I bring it into the house.  A quick sizing has the bike frame well under 8″ wide yet the handle bar pushes that out to 23″.  My hallway is 33″ wide.  Visualise, if you will.

If I could unlock and flip the handlebar in exactly the same way as my bike clamp already does then me, my fellow cyclists and all visitors to their dwellings would be spared the merciless paunch poker.  Pedals, likewise.  I’ve seen them on fold-up bikes, dammit, so don’t try to tell me it’s not possible.

Tidy printout scaling

For some reason I have cut-throat airline tickets in mind for this although you only usually need to print off the first page and ignore the dozen pages of terms and conditions for those.  This is the curiously common situation where a printout spills onto the last page by just a single line or two, causing a spasm at the sloppiness of it (to be recycled as eco-guilt later).  Extra points for irony if the offending text is boilerplate ‘Please consider the environment think before printing this email’.  This is the sort of thing that can totally suck the pleasure out of your mid-morning latte.

Yes, I know it’s possible to change the zoom in preview but how often do you do this?  How hard in comparison for the printer driver to optionally squeeze or stretch the text by 10% to make best use of the paper?  Please, make it so and let me find something new to bleat about.  Thanks.

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blogging like no-one’s reading

May 29, 2010 — Si

The theoretical potential of publishing to the whole damn world for all time can sometimes feel inhibiting.  Especially if there’s a prominent blogging community established in the vicinity.  You can find yourself second-guessing the likely response from an uncertain and imaginary readership, and that’s usually enough to abort too many drafts.

Although flatlining WordPress Stats offer some reassurance here, I’d like to give fair warning to anyone subscribed to this blog with the expectation of well-written, lucid and accountable prose of general interest.  The quality bar is about to drop through the floor.

From here on in, this blog is likely to spout incoherent rambles, irresponsible/unjustified assertions and turgid verbiage that only makes sense in the context of being me.  There’s also a real danger of cusswords.

Thanks for reading thus far.  Continued subscription indicates you agree to the receipt of unmitigated bollocks from this direction for the foreseeable future.  A comment to this effect would be greatly appreciated.

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dear yahoo mail

January 17, 2010 — Si

I finally got round to importing my Yahoo! Mail into GMail and wrote a ‘vacation’ response so I could finally walk away from this weeping sore of an inbox:

Hello,

You just tried to reach me at this Yahoo! address and kind of failed. Maybe you found it in an old e-mail folder or scribbled in the corner of a circus poster. More likely, you found it on a list sold to you by a guy who doesn’t punctuate properly but is nevertheless very keen on exclamation marks.  In fact, you are probably just a bunch of stupid and badly-formatted code.

If you are not a robot and you specifically did want to get in touch with me about something then you’ll need to use a little of that human intelligence you keep going on about.  Google my name and sixball and you can’t go far wrong.

This is to Yahoo! Mail: we had some good times 10 years ago when you were the darling of the web and we could overlook the big banners ads and yipping exclamation mark.  I let you hang around until now just because you were friendly with my iPhone.

Now you are just bringing up the same old crap every day and so it’s time to make a clean break.  Everyone is ditching e-mail for social networks anyway (or even Google Wave).  Guess I’ll still see you when I visit your cool relatives: Flickr (cute), Delicious (smart) and Pipes (bendy).

Si

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