A colleague of mine is in Australia at the moment. This morning he emailed me with a technical query. The message came through to my BlackBerry, so I replied straight away. Back came this message:
Gosh. Allowing for the time difference, your reply came nine hours before I sent the question!
Well, you know what they say. “The impossible we do today. Miracles take a little longer.”
From my fellow Observer columnist, Armando Ianucci this morning…
I have an office at the BBC and so have access to lots of stuff the Beeb would be embarrassed to have leaked (for example, Nicholas Witchell has webbed feet). But, now the BBC mole is out the bag, I can’t resist letting you in on an email I saw recently. It was a round robin saying that there were only a couple of places left on an internal assertiveness training course and if any member of staff was still interested, they ought to put their name forward pretty quickly. Someone replied, not realising the email would go to everyone’s desktop. His reply, I kid you not, was: ‘I would like to put my name forward for a place on the assertiveness training course, but I need to ask my deputy manager first.’…
This morning’s Observer column…
When President Hu Jintao of China arrived in the US last Wednesday, his first appointment was dinner with Bill Gates, co-founder and chairman of Microsoft, at Gates’s mansion (aka San Simeon North) on the shores of Lake Washington. They dined on smoked guinea fowl, which had been shot at by the US Vice-President, Dick Cheney. (He missed, and hit one of his friends instead; the guinea fowl was later killed by humane means.) The pair were joined by Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft, the Chinese ambassador to the US, a number of the President’s aides and the deputy assistant head of protocol at the White House. Owing to an unpatched security hole in Gates’s Windows-powered home-monitoring system, the meeting of the two Great Leaders was bugged and a transcript of their conversation has been obtained by The Observer …
Gates: You Hu?
Hu: I am the President of China.
Gates: Cool. I’m the Chairman of Microsoft. (Hu bows.)
Hu: Because you, Mr Bill Gates, are a friend of China, I am a friend of Microsoft.
Gates: Wow! That’s really cool. We’re very interested in China, you know. Big market. Smart people.
Hu: We are pleased that many great US companies are coming to China – for example Google.
Ballmer: (Heatedly) Those sons of bitches. They stole one of our top Chinese execs …
Gates: Cool it, Steve. Hu doesn’t know about that.
Hu: We also have Yahoo in China. They are very co-operative in rooting out undesirable elements.
Ballmer: (Mutters.) Maybe they could help root out Google …
From a Technology Review interview with David Allen, author of Getting Things Done…
Technology Review: Computers and the Internet let us do more things, but can they really help us get more things done? How does technology fit into a good time-management system?
David Allen: First of all, you don’t manage time. Time is time, and it can’t be managed. What you manage are commitments. The calendar will let you manage, at a maximum, three or four percent of what you have to do. What you really need is a way to keep track of your commitments. Then you start to get a sense of the huge volume of commitments you’ve made, and you are able to review those commitments.
Which reminds me… I bought a copy of Getting Things Done a while back, but I’ve been too busy to get around to reading it yet.
My colleagues and I were working today on revising one of our most successful courses. It’s amazing how quickly stuff begins to look dated, especially if it relates to the Web. Afterwards, I mused about how satisfying it would be to write something that didn’t date, and we fell to wondering what works would pass that test. One of my colleagues had just been to see the centenary production of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot at the Barbican, and said that it struck him as being just as powerful now as it was when it was first performed. So perhaps that is the test of great art — that it never dates.
… is temptation (said Oscar Wilde).
Which is why it is most inconsiderate of Nikon to release this just now.
Apple’s latest wheeze: iTunes To Sell You Your Home Videos For $1.99 Each. Nice satirical piece in The Onion.
CUPERTINO, CA—Apple Computer, producer of the successful iPod MP3 player, is now offering consumers limited rights to buy their own home movies from the media store iTunes for $1.99 each.
“Ladies and gentlemen, the future of home-video viewing is now,” Apple CEO Steve Jobs said at a media event Tuesday morning. “As soon as you record that precious footage of your daughter’s first steps, you’ll be able to buy it right back from iTunes and download it directly to your computer and video iPod.”
Jobs emphasized that the videos will be presented unedited and in their original form, save for a small Apple logo in the lower right-hand corner of the image to protect the company’s copyrighted materials from Internet piracy.
Added Jobs: “No more searching through your movies folder for that footage of your 50th wedding anniversary. Now all you need is a 768Kbps broadband connection and your credit card, and every timeless personal memory you’ve ever shot will be right at your fingertips.”
“Apple has always been about access,” said MacAddict editor Ian Smythe. “Thanks to this revolutionary new software, all your clips—from your son’s bris to your father’s dying message—are available to you, your loved ones, and the 20 million iTunes users, who will be able to view them on up to five different computers.”
Thanks to Pete for the link.
Well, well. Who was the first guy the Chinese president went to see when he touched down in the US today? George Bush? No way. Hu dropped in on Bill Gates at his lakeside mansion (aka San Simeon North) in Seattle. Here’s an excerpt from the Bloomberg report:
April 19 — Chinese President Hu Jintao pronounced himself “a friend” of Microsoft Corp. as he toured the largest software maker’s headquarters and dined on smoked guinea fowl at Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates’ lakeside home. “Because you, Mr. Bill Gates, are a friend of China, I’m a friend of Microsoft,” Hu told Gates yesterday during a demonstration of new software at the company’s Redmond, Washington headquarters. “Also, I am dealing with the operating system produced by Microsoft every day,” he added, drawing laughter from Chinese officials.
Wonder what’s the Chinese for “Fatal Error”.
You could not make this stuff up. According to today’s New York Times, Dubya is planning to lecture the Chinese president on the need to curb his (i.e. China’s) thirst for oil! Yes, that’s right — the US is going to hector the Chinese for guzzling too much oil.
WASHINGTON, April 18 — The competition for access to oil is emerging high on the agenda for President Hu Jintao’s visit to the White House this week. President Bush has called China’s growing demand for oil one reason for rising prices, and has warned Beijing against trying to “lock up” global supplies.
With crude oil selling for more than $70 a barrel and American motorists paying $3 a gallon for gasoline, American officials say the subject cannot be avoided at Thursday’s meeting in the Oval Office, as it was sidestepped when Mr. Bush visited Beijing last fall.
China’s appetite for oil also affects its stance on Iran, where a growing confrontation with the United States over nuclear programs has already unsettled oil markets. China has invested heavily in Iran, and as a permanent member of the Security Council, its position on the question of sanctions is crucial.
Even as Mr. Hu arrived in Seattle on Tuesday, Chinese and American negotiators were debating a proposal for the two presidents to announce a joint study of both nations’ energy needs as a way to ward off conflict in coming decades, when China’s rapidly expanding need for imported energy to sustain its growth may collide with the needs of the United States, Europe and Japan.
In 2004 China used some 6.5 million barrels of oil a day and overtook Japan as the world’s second largest user of petroleum products. The largest, the United States, consumes about 20 million barrels a day…
I’m not known for my admiration of the repressive Chinese regime, but in this case I trust that Hu tells George where to stuff his demands.
Serendipity. I stumbled on this lovely essay by Ian Jack while looking for something else. Sample:
Perhaps the best Sunday morning of my life happened in June 1970, when I walked across Hampstead Heath from an interview with Harold Evans, which closed with his saying that I’d got a job on his newspaper. It was sunny, warm enough for the Sunday Times editor to wear nothing more than a dressing gown (he’d told me to be early, but he was in bed when I got there) as he conducted the conversation over his breakfast orange juice at a table in his back garden.
His house was a Tudorbethan villa on the Holly Lodge Estate in Highgate. I remember he said, in the context of where I could afford to live, that a house like his would cost about £20,000, but that flats could be had for £5,000 or £6,000. My salary as a sub-editor would be £3,000. All these amounts seemed large.
I walked across the Heath to the tube at Hampstead in a daze of excitement. The sun sparkled on the ponds, couples walked dogs or kissed each other on the grass, the dome of St Paul’s shivered far away in the haze, a kite bobbed up on the horizon….