… is a 79-year-old British pensioner, who makes videos in which he talks quietly about his life, work and passion for motorcycles. You can find him here.
Monthly Archives: August 2006
How to get a job in Silicon Valley
Wonderful essay by Guy Kawasaki. Cynical horse sense from beginning to end. In the same league as his 12/20/30 Rule of Powerpoint.
Old media and the Net
A guy from the Richard and Judy Show (a daytime sofa programme running on UK TV; not sure which channel) telephoned this afternoon to ask if I’d be interested in coming on tomorrow’s show to talk about blogging. It seemed they’d been reading the intro I wrote for the Observer‘s list of “Websites that changed the world”.
I said that I couldn’t. “Why?” he asked, “are you out of the country?” “No”, I said, “I’m busy tomorrow. I have a meeting.” There was silence on the other end of the line as he digested the astonishing fact that someone would decline an invitation to appear on the show because he was busy. After he’d recovered, the conversation went like this:
Chap: “Well then can I talk to you about your piece about blogs?”
Me: “My piece wasn’t about blogs. It was about websites that had changed the world”.
Chap: “Oh”.
Me: “Blogs are personal websites published by individuals.”
Chap: “Oh. But what do you think are the really big blogs?”
Me: “Eh? What do you mean Big Blogs?”
Chap: “Well, you know like …” (and here he named a Blog written by an alleged London call girl whose notoriety eventually earned her a book publishing contract but whose name escapes me at the moment).
The conversation meandered on hopelessly like this for several more minutes until it finally dawned on me that (a) the chap knew absolutely nothing about blogging and (b) was so locked into the mindset of broadcast TV that he couldn’t actually comprehend the notion of millions of independently-published blogs. For him, as for everyone else in television, the idea of user-generated content is an oxymoron. It slowly became clear that what he meant by “Big Blogs” were ones that had been reported in the newspapers.
Travelling light (contd.)
Humph! Quentin (who’s in California at Linux World) has responded to the new security regime by splashing out on a Pelican case, if you please.
Military-grade hardware, as used by the best professional photographers. Pricey too. It’s going to make my battered old roll-on case look pretty tatty. Growl.
Meanwhile, back in the UK, the restrictions on carry-on luggage have been eased. It’s now permissable to take a laptop bag as specified in the illustration below (from BBC News site).
Quote of the day
One person in three in the United States weighs as much as the other two put together.
Overheard on BBC Radio 4 today.
Investors in shady enterprise cry ‘foul’
Honestly, you couldn’t make this up. Investors in Betonsports.com are threatening to sue Baker Tilley, the accountants who drew up the prospectus on which the company was founded.
I remember reading said prospectus at the time. It said, quite clearly, that some aspects of the company’s business were illegal in the United States. I also remember that this didn’t stop ‘respectable’ City institutions and their clients from stampeding to buy the shares. I was naively astonished at the greed implicit in this. It seemed that there were limits to the “due diligence” about which venture capitalists make such a fuss. If there was a sure-fire bet in prospect, then it seemed that due diligence could be jettisoned as fast as yesterday’s newspaper.
But now that the company’s CEO has been incarcerated by the Feds, and it’s clear that Betonsports will be worthless shortly, those poor investor lambs are crying foul and looking for someone to blame for their woes. Ye Gods!
The most expensive photographs ever taken…
…are here. And the cost had nothing to do with the fact that they were taken with a Hasselblad!
Gubernator tackles iPod/gel terrorists
From SFgate.com…
Three hundred National Guard troops were ordered Thursday to airports in San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles and San Diego as state and local officials ramped up security measures around California in response to the arrests of suspected terrorists accused of plotting to blow up airplanes headed from Britain to the United States.
Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger assigned troops to the three largest airports that regularly receive flights from Europe in the first such deployment of the California National Guard since the Sept. 11 attacks five years ago. Uniformed troops carrying guns were to arrive at airports this morning and will stay in place for at least a week, according to Adjutant Gen. William H. Wade II, the head of the state’s National Guard.
“I can assure the people of California that we’re doing everything to keep them safe and to return our airports to normal operations as quickly as possible,” he said. “We need the public’s help and their patience.”
“I see”, says Cory Doctorow,
“Governor Schwarzenneger has deployed 300 National Guardswomen and men to California’s airports to ensure that if liquid/gel/iPod terrorists escape from a British prison and fly to San Diego (without blowing up the plane), and then get off and start hijacking the entire airport, they can be shot.”
Travelling light (contd.)
From a BBC NEWS report…
Russian musicians returning from London after the Bolshoi Theatre’s season face an overland journey because of the new UK cabin baggage ban on planes.
They are under contract to keep their instruments with them and cannot check them in as hold baggage, chief conductor Alexander Vedernikov said.
They will probably have to travel by rail via Paris, he added….
And I thought I was unlucky having to put my MacBook in the hold!
I remember being awestruck as a kid when I was told that Pablo Casals always purchased a second (First Class) airline seat for his cello.
Jimmy Wales, illuminated
The NYT has a daft ‘lifestyle’ piece about Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia. Sample:
His home is not an Italianate villa on a grape-ridden hillside in Napa but a four-bedroom ranch house in St. Petersburg, Fla., where he moved for the simple reason that it was sunny and cheaper than San Diego, his former home. At home, Mr. Wales has honed the good-enough style so well — or rather, not honed it — that the place will not even remotely be featured in House & Garden. He dresses casually, Florida-style, goes by the nickname Jimbo, and although he does drive a foreign car, it’s a Hyundai Accent. “It’s sort of like an appliance as a car,” he said.
He bought his DVD player at Wal-Mart, and his television set has something inside it called a cathode ray tube. Heard of it, kids?
About the only thing he has that aspires to a higher ideal is, of all things, a flashlight. The SureFire M6 blasts the competition, which averages 60 lumens, with a 250-lumen light beam. The company bills it as a “searchlight disguised as a flashlight” and boasts that “SWAT teams use the lights to temporarily blind suspects at night.”