Sunlight memories

Posted on by

Just listening to Jerry Springer on Desert Island Discs One of his choices is Here Comes the Sun by the Beatles. He chose it because it was played as his wife came down the aisle at their wedding. As the track plays I am suddenly transported back to the moment, forty years ago, when I first heard the song. It was a glorious, crisp Autumn morning at the beginning of my second year in Cambridge. The sun was flooding in through the bay window of the College flat that Carol and I and our first child then shared. I had just finished constructing a crude DIY Hi-Fi system. A few days earlier we had purchased the album, but hadn’t been able to listen to it. So I put it on the turntable and, with bated breath, switched on the amp. And there it was. I thought it was such a beautiful, optimistic, moving song.

It still is. In a few days, my first grandchild will be born. And when she arrives I will play it then too. Strange how music reaches the places that other media cannot reach.

No comment

Posted on by

Spotted in a leafy Cambridge road this morning. Imagine what you’d get if you Googled them.

LATER: I just did that (i.e. a Google search for “erection specialists Cambridge”) and found that other photographers have spotted them too — for example here and here. But at least the ‘sponsored links’ were exactly what you’d expect.

The fearful commentariat

Posted on by

Nice piece by Shane Richmond in the Telegraph about how fear and loathing of Twitter is leading newspaper columnists to make utter fools of themselves.

It’s now possible for columnists and companies to hear what people are saying about them. That’s unnerving for columnists, not least because their opinions are now frequently challenged by people who know more than they do. Instead of responding like adults – correcting when they’ve made a mistake, engaging when someone raises a sensible point and defending themselves from false accusations – they are whining like children and dismissing technologies that they don’t understand.

It’s not the complaints culture on Twitter that annoys me, it’s the complaints culture among columnists that is getting tiresome.

Amen. Worth reading in full.

Perfect timing

Posted on by

Emma Freud told an interesting story on the radio this morning about her father, Clement. He had, she said, “a perfect death”. On the day in question, he’d been to the races (at Exeter), had won on the horses, had a good lunch with his “second best friend” (apparently he was punctilious about ranking his friendships), and was writing his column (about the Exeter meeting) for a racing newspaper when he dropped dead in mid-sentence. The next day, Emma and her Mum woke up his computer and found that the last words he’d written were “In God’s good time…”.

Orange’s ‘unlimited’ iPhone

Posted on by

Rory Cellan-Jones has done a useful investigation into whether iPhone users on the Orange network can expect a better deal than they’d get from O2. Conclusion: don’t bet on it. He concludes with this para which, in a way, tells you everything you need to know about the iPhone:

The problem for the operators is that users no longer see the iPhone and similar devices as phones but as small computers. And who wants to be told 25 days into each month that they must now stop playing around with their computer and just use it to make calls?

It’s also pretty clear from his account that the deal Apple has extracted from Orange leaves that unfortunate network with very little wriggle room for undercutting O2.

UPDATE: Email from my colleague Michael Dales, who has a long memory:

This has always been the way with Apple – if you look at how much Apple charges for computers, and how much resellers charge, the prices hardly change at all. Apple seem to police the prices – you will charge our RRP or forget it.

On the original iMac I remember there was a fuss where Tesco managed to get a job lot cheap from somewhere or another and were selling them a great discount, and I think Apple tried to stop them.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2001/04/20/tesco_offer_shifts_400_imacs/

Welcome to the world of Jobs :)

An end to wrap-rage?

Posted on by

Ever bought an SD or Compact Flash card and entertained fantasies about using the scissors which has just nearly sliced your thumb off to slit the throat of the guy who designed the packaging? Join the club. But help may be at hand. When I logged into Amazon.co.uk this morning, I found this:

It seems they’re doing deals with suppliers to create “frustration-free packaging”. About time too.