Newton Abbott station, Devon.
Travellers
Fellow-passengers on a London-bound train.
Through the keynote
On Tuesday, I went to Torquay to give the opening Keynote at the Naace Annual Strategic Conference. I confessed at the beginning that I was never sure what the purpose of a Keynote was, but said that I thought it was akin to a sermon, which reminded me of a passage from Trollope’s Barchester Towers that I’d been reading in the train on the way down.
There is, perhaps, no greater hardship at present inflicted on mankind in civilised and free countries, than the necessity of listening to sermons. No one but a preaching clergyman has, in these realms, the power of compelling an audience to sit silent, and be tormented. No one but a preaching clergyman can revel in platitudes, truisms, and untruisms, and yet receive, as his undisputed privilege, the same respectful demeanour as thought words of impassioned eloquence, or persuasive logic, fell from his lips.
I then launched into my farrago of “platitudes, truisms, and untruisms” about our changing media ecosystem and was heard respectfully. It was blogged live by Ian Usher, who did a remarkable job. For which, many thanks.
The lawyers are coming
From this week’s Economist…
But the fact remains that even after her wins this week, [Mrs Clinton] is well behind in the race for elected delegates, by roughly 1,360 to 1,220. That might not sound that much. But delegates are awarded proportionally and there are now only ten states left in play, some of them favourable to Barack Obama. He will almost certainly finish ahead in terms of elected delegates. So, Mrs Clinton’s only hope is to persuade the 796 “superdelegates” (members of Congress, senior party officials and other bigwigs) to reverse the elected delegate outcome—and push her over the 2,025 target.
This is where everything could turn ugly (and it is hardly pleasant at the moment). Mrs Clinton will need to present the superdelegates with an excuse to overturn the verdict of all those caucuses and primaries. It is still possible that she could win the popular vote, especially if she triumphs in Pennsylvania: that would help her case enormously. She will also no doubt point out that she has won in all of America’s biggest states, bar Illinois and Georgia, as well as several swing states, including Ohio. But Mr Obama will have powerful arguments of his own, such as his appeal to independents and his victory in Virginia. So the chances are that Mrs Clinton sooner or later will resort to a somewhat legal approach: asking the superdelegate-judges in effect to dismiss the verdict of the first trial on the basis that the procedure was unfair.
Imagine the scene: a posse of (mostly white) VIPs overturning a popular choice: a black man.
In praise of tech support
Caller: Hey, can you help me? My computer has locked up, and no matter how many times I type eleven, it won’t unfreeze.
Tech Support: What do you mean, “type eleven?”
Caller: The message on my screen says, “Error Type 11!”
From David Pogue.
Swiss bank sees reason? Surely not
It’s the next stage in the WikiLeaks story. According to the New York Times Blog today,
A Swiss bank on Wednesday moved to withdraw a lawsuit that it had filed against a Web site that it claimed had displayed stolen documents revealing confidential information about the accounts of the bank’s clients.
Lawyers involved in the case said the move by Bank Julius Baer most likely ends its battle against Wikileaks, a Web site that allows people to post documents anonymously “to be of assistance to people of all regions who wish to reveal unethical behavior in their governments and corporations.”
The bank last month obtained an order from U.S. District Judge Jeffrey S. White in San Francisco that obstructed, but did not absolutely prevent, access to material posted on Wikileaks by turning off the domain name wikileaks.org. The judge’s action drew a flurry of media attention and a barrage of legal filings by media and other organizations arguing that the order violated the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment.
After a hearing on Friday, Judge White withdrew that order, saying that he was worried about its First Amendment implications and that he thought it might not be possible to prevent viewing of the documents once they had been posted on the Web anyway.
It’s been a huge PR disaster for them — and succeeded mainly in convincing people that there might be something fishy going on. Talk about shooting yourself in the foot!
On this day…
… in 1946, Winston Churchill delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri.
Wonder if it needs to be updated to deal with the Putin/Medvedev threat? The first task, though, is to figure out how to pronounce ‘Medvedev’. There was an hilarious discussion on the Today programme yesterday involving John Sargent and the BBC’s pronounciation expert who said that the correct pronounciation involved putting a ‘y’ after each consonant (or something like that). Sargent took an endearingly practical approach to incomprehensible names, recalling that whenever he reported on the doings of the Revd. Ndabaningi Sithole he never attempted the forename without first thinking “rubber dinghy”.
Power over railtracks
I’ve just boarded a Virgin train at Paddington, bound for Torquay, and found a plug for my laptop. Hooray!
90 minutes with Barack Obama
Marc Andreessen met up with Barack Obama before his campaign really got off the ground, and has posted some interesting reflections on the meeting. Extract:
Smart, normal, curious, not radical, and post-Boomer.
If you were asking me to write a capsule description of what I would look for in the next President of the United States, that would be it.
Having met him and then having watched him for the last 12 months run one of the best-executed and cleanest major presidential campaigns in recent memory, I have no doubt that Senator Obama has the judgment, bearing, intellect, and high ethical standards to be an outstanding president — completely aside from the movement that has formed around him, and in complete contradition to the silly assertions by both the Clinton and McCain campaigns that he’s somehow not ready.
Worth reading in full.
IAD
It stands for Internet Addiction Disorder. Amusing piece by Mark Bittman about how he decided to become a Digital Sabbatarian…
My name is Mark, and I’m a techno-addict. But after my airplane experience, I decided to do something about it. Thus began my “secular Sabbath” — a term I found floating around on blogs — a day a week where I would be free of screens, bells and beeps. An old-fashioned day not only of rest but of relief.
Like many, though, I wondered whether breaking my habit would be entirely beneficial. I worried about the colleagues, friends, daughters, parents and so on who relied on me, the people who knew that whether I was home or away I would get back to them, if not instantly then certainly before the end of the day. What if something important was happening, something that couldn’t wait 24 hours?
Or was I just one of those Americans who’ve developed the latest in American problems, Internet addiction disorder?
So he decided to take weekends off from digital communications. How did he get on? Not badly, it seems:
I went back to nonwork, diligently following my rules to do less one day a week. The walks, naps and reading became routine, and all as enjoyable as they were before I had to force myself into doing them. It’s been more than six months, and while I’m hardly a new man — no one has yet called me mellow — this achievement is unlike any other in my life. And nothing bad has happened while I’ve been offline; the e-mail and phone messages, RSS feeds, are all there waiting for me when I return to them.
I would no more make a new-agey call to find inner peace than I would encourage a return to the mimeograph. But I do believe that there has to be a way to regularly impose some thoughtfulness, or at least calm, into modern life — or at least my version. Once I moved beyond the fear of being unavailable and what it might cost me, I experienced what, if I wasn’t such a skeptic, I would call a lightness of being. I felt connected to myself rather than my computer. I had time to think, and distance from normal demands. I got to stop.
Hmm… Why am I typing this on a Sunday evening?