Blogiversary

One year old today
Blame Chris Locke

Tablets - take two (and call me in the morning)

My snarky comments about Gates and his Tablet PC got me some email responses.
A semi-submersible options holder of Mountain View writes:
I don�t think you get what is being described here. �Gates is talking about annotating a web page with a pen, (which means you can draw arrows, underline things, circle one person in a group picture or whatever) then sending that page to someone.

Weblogging or normal email would allow you to send a link and a comment but that is not the same thing.

I have a javascript toolbar favourite in IE that gets the current selection, opens my weblog tool, pastes it in with attribution and lets me add comments. I can underline with <u> or whatever. I could grab a screenshot and scribble on it if I want to, but it's a lot less useful.
Gates' example is something that's better to give than receive, like voicemail.
Getting a monster bitmap of the article with scribbles on, instead of a link to page is not enticing if it isn't coming from the richest man in the world. If it can annotate the page and make a valid HTML page of the result, that's interesting. It's doable as well - have a look at this QuickTopic version of the Windows Media DRM page

Another correspondent comments:
I couldn't pass up the opportunity to point out that in your article on BBBG (Big Bad Bill Gates) using his tablet PC to annotate magazine articles. He probably can't if his tablet incorporates DRM. He'll have an expensive hunk o' plastic and glass, and he'll still be tearing out magazine articles and sending them to his buds.

CD Copy Protection Worthless

New Scientist
John Halderman, a computer scientist from Princeton University in New Jersey, plans to show delegates at a digital copyright conference in Washington DC next week that the idea of CD copy-prevention is "fundamentally misguided".[...]
The record industry could lose a fortune if people stop buying CDs and make their own copies. Halderman reckons he has a solution for them. "Reduce the cost of new CDs; if discs cost only a few dollars each, buying them might be preferable to spending the time and effort to make copies or find them online."

AlienAid - TV - UK to US

Andrew Sullivan on how British vulgarity is taking US TV by storm.

Macrovision and Midbar to merge

Maybe they can gather all the snake-oil together in one company and join Dataplay and LiquidAudio in the DRM graveyard
CNET.com By melding the two companies' products, they hope to be able to improve compatibility with computers. The companies also promise that by next year CDs using their joint copy-protection technology will include two versions of songs--one for ordinary CD players, and one that can be loaded onto computer hard drives in much the same way that MP3s can be "ripped" or copied onto computers today. Listeners will not be able to make unrestricted copies of these alternate digital files, but the songs will be able to be transferred to mobile devices such as MP3 players and even burned onto CDs in a limited way, company executives said.

"We've kind of learned over the past year that consumers are really fighting this," said Brian Dunn, Macrovision's senior vice president of business development. "They want more flexibility."

I do hope the labels don't fall for this. If it can be heard, it can be copied. These things are just customer-deterrents.

Geek presents

What do you give the man who has everything? Penicillin.

For the geek who thinks he has everything, you could give him the raw materials to make anything - samples of the complete periodic table of the elements.

AT&T Update

Part of AT&T's standard threatening letter for non-payment is to cut off Cable TV, @home, and mobile services, as well as landline long distance. This strikes me as contrary to the spirit of the 1996 telecoms deregulation act.
Also, they are among those lobbying the FCC for the removal of all documentation and accounting requirements, so records of disputed bills vanish (their online billing only holds a 3-month history).

Lots of interesting info at TeleTruth

Missing the point

Gushing Tablet PC Puff piece:
For years, William H. Gates III and Warren E. Buffett have routinely mailed each other magazine articles that have caught their eye. They rip pieces out of the magazines, jot notes in the margins, and pop them in the mail. Gates anticipates the day when he won't have to mess with all that. With his new Tablet PC, he plans to call up articles from the Web, scrawl thoughts on the screen with a digital pen, and shoot it off to Buffett via e-mail. He's already using an early version of tablet software to send electronically annotated articles to Microsoft colleagues. "I have anticipated this for many, many years. And here it is," says Gates.

Am I the only one who found this laughable? You don't need to spend millions on research and thousands on a tablet computer to do this; you just need to get free weblogging software. Can't Gates type?

AlienAid - Guy Fawkes and Halloween - London, UK to Bay Area, CA, US

In the UK around this time, small boys' thoughts turn to explosives. Guy Fawkes Night, or Bonfire Night, on November 5th, is a ritual of burning in effigy Guido Fawkes, the leader of a terrorist gang who were foiled in their attempt to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1604. Fires are lit, potatoes roasted, and fireworks let off with abandon. Preceding this, boys sit by their effigies and ask for 'penny for the guy', to get the funds to buy the fireworks in the first place.
Or do they still? The American Halloween, or autumn confectionery begging festival, was making inroads when we left the UK 5 years ago.
Here, we carve pumpkins, we dress up for Jerry's annual Halloween party, and tonight we'll dress up again and walk the leafy lanes of Willow Glen with the boys collecting sweets and chocolate from strangers dressed as monsters, then hide it from them the next day so they don't spend the day riding blood sugar rushes and crashes.
It was a lot of fun walking the neighbourhood - top tips:
Go out between 6 and 8pm;
The rule is, if the porch light is on, they have sweets ready and welcome visitors, otherwise, move on;
Kerb crawling in an SUV alongside your children running up and down the driveways is gauche.

AlienAid - Telephone Numbers - London, UK to Bay Area, CA, US

In the UK, telephone numbers were originally handed out by the Post Office. Local numbers of varying length will connect you to nearby people. For long distance, you dial an area code starting with zero. There were short codes to connect you to nearby exchanges without going long distance, and in the early days of computer BBS's people would dial these in sequence to connect across the country for the price of a local call, ending up with a ridiculously long number.
Historically, areas with lots of numbers got a shorter area code. London was 01, Edinburgh Birmingham 021,(thanks Simon)and so on down the pecking order (Sandown, Isle of Wight, was 09834, but the numbers were only 4 digits). When mobile phones and faxes came in, they needed more numbers, so they went through a convoluted transformation scheme. May parents' area code went from 01 to 081 to 0181 to 0208, changing every couple of years. Non-London area codes had a 1 inserted before them. Mobile phones now get distinct numbers starting with 07 or 09, and the cost of calling them is paid by the caller.

In the US, things are different. You have a seven-digit phone number, and a 3-digit area code. The pecking order here is the number of clicks for a rotary phone (and hence dialling time) - add up the digits of the area code, counting 0 as 10 to see how important your area was when they handed them out. Guess where has 212.
This scheme has its own logic, but it is not well-coupled with billing. Cellphones have numbers in the area code of the billing address, and calling them costs you more. Local calls are included in your monthly fee.
Long distance is by default charged at ridiculously inflated prices. Unless you buy a long distance service plan, you'll be billed a dollar a minute or more. There is no good way of telling what a call will cost you from the number you dial, and you won't find out for a month until you get the bill.

There is one particular trap for the unwary that I fell into recently. Because of the historic size of area codes, some calls to the same area code are not counted as local, but are 'local toll' calls. Unwittingly, I had entered just such a number from the list supplied by my ISP into my computer to dial them when I updated the OS. As any kind of broadband is unobtainable in our area of the 'Capital of Silicon Valley', and as the only people who call after 8 pm are tele-marketers (our family being in a different time zone), I tend to dial into the net and leave the computer connected until I go to bed hours later.

I got the next Phone bill and saw a charge for $77 for local toll calls, to a number in Gilroy. I realised what had happened, changed the number and used the online billing service to complain to AT&T about this bill. No response.
I got the next bill. This time there was a charge of $493 for local toll. I called AT&T, escalated my way through customer service for 3 hours, faxed the details to the Disputes department, and now, a few weeks later, they still want nearly $600.

Has Google stopped spidering?

With my new AlienAid meme champing at the bit, I've been searching Google for it every so often for the last few days, and seen nothing.

I then tried searching for other people's sites, and found Google has nothing cached newer then midnight on Saturday (search for CNN).

Normally it is only a few hours behind on frequently-updated sites like boingboing, Doc, slashdot, Scripting news or Instapundit, but today they're all frozen in the cache as of Friday.

Google News is still updating, but it is only a subset of mass media sites - the fresh blog news is just not there.

AlienAid - Bacon - London, UK to Bay Area, CA, US

In England, there are several kinds of bacon. broadly though, there are two - streaky bacon, and back bacon. Streaky is fatty and shrivels, Back has big crcles of meatiness in it. There are different ways of curing it which make a difference, and if you want great bacon in the UK, go to The Meat Like It Used To Be Co, 50 Cannon Lane, Pinner, HA5 1HW Tel: 020 88664611

In the US, they butcher the pigs differently, and you never get Back bacon, just very fatty streaky bacon that is halfway to being crackling. However, if you go to Cosentinos, you can sometimes find Irish Bacon (imported from Ireland, no less). Or you can buy it online by mail order, so you can make proper Bacon Butties (HP sauce is available in many supermarkets).
There is also something called 'Canadian Bacon' which seems to be a kind of circular ham, but is not a bad subsitute for back bacon.

But what happens to the missing meaty bits in the US?
They get sold as Pork Loin, which is a splendid thing to marinate and barbeque or roast, and usually good value.

AlienAid - Tea - London, UK to Bay Area, CA, US

Tea is a core part of British culture. It is almost impossible to visit a household in the UK without being offered a cup of tea, and very impolite to decline one. There are in fact two schools of tea-drinking - the strong cuppa brigade, and the tea aesthetes, or teasthetes. These are best delineated by a splendid vignette (which I am reconstructing from memory) in the otherwise forgettable film 'Mona Lisa', in which Bob Hoskins, playing a rough cockney, is seated in a plush West End hotel. A waiter approaches:
'Would sir care for something to drink?'
'I'll 'ave a cuppa tea'
'Earl Grey or Lapsang Souchong?'
'Nah mate, TEA!'

George Orwell explains the 'nice cuppa' better than anyone, while Douglas Adams explains the allure of Earl Grey (note that they differ on the crucial question of milk first or second - I'm with George on this one).

In America, if you are offered tea, what you will get is a cold, sweet drink made from teabags, cooled with ice and with sugar and lemon added. Getting an English-style cup of tea is quite difficult. Most restaurants will provide a teabag and lukewarm water on demand, which doesn't really work. In this part of California green tea is widely available, and this is generally supposed to be made with water that is off the boil. The ubiquity of coffee shops extends some hope, but Starbucks make poor tea, selling a range of teabags called 'Tazo' that trigger the 'Nah mate, TEA!' response in me, which is odd as I generally incline to the teasthete end of the spectrum. However, most supermarkets will sell you Twinings teabags, or even Tetley ones, for you to brew in the privacy of your own home. Trader Joes have a reasonably priced own-brand range.
The real answer for the teasthete is Peets Coffee and Tea who sell wonderful leaf tea at reasonable prices. There are several branches in the Bay area, and if you can't find one they'll deliver it.

Making your own is made more difficult by the problem of obtaining a decent electric kettle, as the US's 110 volt system means boiling water takes about twice as long as with the Uk's robust 240 volts, so boiling the kettle on the stove top may be quicker.

AlienAid

Reading Cory's English Standard Tribe and about Gary Turner's homesickness for Glasgow reminded me of an idea I had ages ago (pre-blog) but never got round to doing anything about. The idea is to provide helpful mappings between cultures for displaced aliens such as myself.
When you move to another country, timezone or even a different area within a country, a lot of your cultural referents are misplaced or disconnected. The obvious ones - your sudden lack of any sense of the geography of the place, or where to go to shop for anything, or what the currency is worth - are usually overcome quickly, but the more subtle ones can lurk for months or years before they bite and give that sudden moment of anomie, alienation or perhaps external prespective.
I am great believer in learning from others' experiences, and conversely sharing mine.

Here's the germ of the idea. I'm going to write about some of these cultural disconnects, and put the tag word 'alienaid' along with the topic, and the places I'm translating between in. See above for an example. As 'alienaid' is currently a null search on Google, if I do this and other people join in, searching for alienaid in additon to the terms or locations will give the cultural translation needed. If I get enough repsonses, I'll register alienaided.org and collect them there.

Oops - Daylight saved

Just noticed it's an hour later than I thought it was. My mac automatically put the clock back, so it's really 3am, or rather it's 2am again. I should go to bed.