Maybe we’re doing OK? Maybe we’re going to die of overcrowding…
Archive for May, 2007
New Scientist sums up most of the available evidence for climate change and describes it relatively dispassionately, which is very useful for all of us. Worth reading and digesting.
I very nearly got caught out by this fraud when buying the Wii. Message: always use due diligence on a site you have never bought from before. Thankfully the fraud on my card amounted to no more than a £30 pay-as-you-go phone top up. I’m not sure what it was, but two days after placing an order my hackles rose and I checked them out more properly and discovered a number of helpful people who were trying to get it shut down.
Picked up the Wii this weekend - it’s the first games console I’ve ever bought. I normally play games for an hour or so and then get bored, so having them on a PC makes more sense for me (because most games come to PC at some stage, and the quality / speed / sound is pretty good.
However the Wii looked funky enough in terms of control system to make me think about it, and then Caroline said she wanted one, so the die was cast.
We had almost no time to do anything with it, but the control interface is excellent - you really do feel like you are playing tennis, golf, baseball. Little things like the speaker built into the Wiimote makes for a little extra realism. The sight of Caroline boxing was really quite terrifying - you had to give her a wide berth to avoid being hit. You can feel some muscles afterwards, and being given a Wii age of 42 definitely makes you think about doing more Wii training. So a good start, and it is great to have a games machine who’s default usage position is standing up, not stuck to a chair twitching your elbows slightly (as most other consoles or PC games force you to into).
Nice to see that JDF has started blogging (prizes for knowing what the “F” is). Last weeks is on outsourcing of professional services.
In my view, the outsourcing of repetitive process jobs to low-cost countries and then to robots will clearly apply to professional services. Many (including PwC) have their knowledge management (research and analysis) done in China and India. Software development is nearer professional services than accounts payable processing. So the important question is what work we will be doing in high labour cost countries? Personally, I’ll be retired, so will watch with interest.
Jonza notes a superb anecdote about Wolfowitz:
Paul Wolfowitz has often been blissfully unaware of the full extent of his unpopularity. That was evident recently when he walked into a lift at the World Bank headquarters in Washington with another member of staff.
Making small talk, he asked her the significance of the blue ribbon she was wearing. The employee bravely told him it was being worn by staff seeking his dismissal or resignation. The lift ride continued in silence.
Back right - easy to spot. What a lovely place to gather: low sun, autumnal trees and vineyards (clearly the most important).
My future posts plugin broke on WP2.2 on the Pegasus site. A quick fix to sort this out is to edit query.php in wp-includes.
Change line 969 from
$where .= " AND (post_type = '$post_type' AND (post_status = 'publish'";
to
$where .= " AND (post_type = '$post_type' AND (post_status = 'publish' OR post_status = 'future'";
and change line 972 from
$where .= " OR post_status = 'future' OR post_status = 'draft'";
to
$where .= " OR post_status = 'draft'";
Sorted.
Anto recommends Launchy, an open source launcher for Windows - it is a little like bits of Quicksilver for the Mac. Nice.
Just a reminder that the five-seven-nine point questionnaire how-strongly-do-you-agree scale is called a Likert scale. And that Jakob says you should use it with radio buttons, and short questionnaires.
Good news for all at the Waz, I hope. Half a billion quid is pretty good going for Mr Danson.
Nice program (Address Magic Personal), probably worth having, to convert, e.g. between outlook and LDIF.
Happy birthday to Mr Adamson and Mrs Watson.
Scott Adams loves Taiwanese government. It has to be said, the idea of fisticuffs in parliament is neat. After all, there’s a sword line in the mother of parliaments so that people kept away from each other.
If there is $200bn in 1,000 deals in the metals and mining industry in two years. Surely some of this must just be recycled - there wasn’t a stash of money waiting to be used? Or it is all shares buoyed up by the raw material prices. This is a good example of why I wouldn’t make it in the city - it just makes no sense.
Do you think anyone said “she canna take it, she’s breaking up” when it was clear that the satellite was going down? I hope so.
Nice little application for doing Treo ringtones. I’m not sure I can bring myself to have vile songs instead of my vile ring, but it’s nice to contemplate.
Some interesting thinking from Hagel on the what might happen if the world we inhabit becomes more power law than normal distribution.
So I was just about to post about TrendHunter when Tom (who sits next to me, confusingly for the office) sent me Trendwatching. A trend or a craze?
