A telephone tethered to the wall, like a goat.
Miserable failure
If you do a Google search using the terms “miserable failure” (without the quotes), guess what you get? Couldn’t have happened to a dumber guy.
Google comments:
We don’t condone the practice of googlebombing, or any other action that seeks to affect the integrity of our search results, but we’re also reluctant to alter our results by hand in order to prevent such items from showing up.
Managing email
Overwhelmed by email (who isn’t?) Try these tips. And if you’re a Mac user, you could always resort to template-based replies. (Thanks to the Guardian Online Blog for the links.
I say, Nigel, bad show, what?
According to The Register , if your name is Nigel, Apple won’t allow you to have it engraved on your shiny new iPod. The text is rejected as “Inappropriate”. Hmmm…
Steve Jobs: the alternative to iTunes is piracy
From MercuryNews.com
Jobs, speaking to reporters before the opening of the Apple Expo in Paris, acknowledged that some record companies were pushing him to raise the price of each song download, currently 99 cents on the U.S. iTunes site.
Record companies already make more profit by selling a song through iTunes than on a CD, with all the associated manufacturing and marketing costs, Jobs said.
“So if they want to raise the prices it just means they’re getting a little greedy,” he said.
The Apple co-founder and CEO indicated he plans to stand firm. “We’re trying to compete with piracy, we’re trying to pull people away from piracy and say, ‘You can buy these songs legally for a fair price,”’ he said. “But if the price goes up a lot, they’ll go back to piracy. Then everybody loses.”
Apple has sold about 22 million of its iPod digital music players and more than 500 million songs through the iTunes Music Store. The service accounts for 82 percent of all legally downloaded music in the United States.
Google finds Roman villa
Yep. From Nature (so it must be true!)
Using satellite images from Google Maps and Google Earth, an Italian computer programmer has stumbled upon the remains of an ancient villa. Luca Mori was studying maps of the region around his town of Sorbolo, near Parma, when he noticed a prominent, oval, shaded form more than 500 metres long. It was the meander of an ancient river, visible because former watercourses absorb different amounts of moisture from the air than their surroundings do.
His eye was caught by unusual ‘rectangular shadows’ nearby. Curious, he analysed the image further, and concluded that the lines must represent a buried structure of human origin. Eventually, he traced out what looked like the inner courtyards of a villa.
Quote of the day
80 percent of Republicans are just Democrats who don’t know what’s going on.
Robert F. Jennedy Jr, in an extraordinary speech, “We Must Take America Back” which is worth reading in full. Thanks to Ray Ison for the link.
The Economist on VoIP
If you thought I was a bit hyperbolic about VoIP, you should see this week’s Economist
It is now no longer a question of whether VOIP will wipe out traditional telephony, but a question of how quickly it will do so. People in the industry are already talking about the day, perhaps only five years away, when telephony will be a free service offered as part of a bundle of services as an incentive to buy other things such as broadband access or pay-TV services. VOIP, in short, is completely reshaping the telecoms landscape. And that is why so many people have been making such a fuss over Skype—a small company, yes, but one that symbolises a massive shift for a trillion-dollar industry.
Crazy pairings
A few miles further on, we came on this sign.
Now, Sawtry is a quiet and undistinguished village in deepest Cambridgeshire. What it’s doing twinned with one of the great cultural sites of Europe — home to Bach, Goethe, Schiller and Herder — is beyond me. Apart from giving its name to a period in recent German history, Weimar has (so I learn from Wikipedia) been “a site of pilgrimage for the German intelligentsia since Goethe first moved there in the late 18th century”. It seems that Goethe, Schiller and Nietzsche are buried there, and it houses the archives of Goethe and Schiller. I cannot for the life of me seeing anyone making a pilgrimage to Sawtry. So how this this bizarre coupling come about?
Arriving where we started
Strange coincidences. Tom and I got lost in Cambridgeshire this morning looking for a place he needed to visit for a school project and came unexpectedly on this signpost.
And suddenly I remembered the four lines of Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’ (from Four Quartets) which I quoted in my book…
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Later, when we got home, I looked up the text. The poem continues:
Through the unknown, remembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half heard, in the stillness
Between the two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always–
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of things shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.
Strange how an unusual placename can fix something in one’s memory.