I remember my father

Today is Remembrance Day to pay tribute to all those who fought and died in the various World Wars as well as those involved in present day conflicts.

My father would've been 85 if he were still alive, alas he only made 73. But its amazing considering that he spent three and half years as a Japanese POW that he made it that far at all. He buried many of his friends with his own hands during those years and the affects lingered on well into his old age.

One of the greatest gifts my father gave me was that of tolerance. While he had a hatred for the Japanese that he could never shake, he never once tried to instill this hatred into me, in fact he talked very little about what happened to him during his imprisonment. Just the odd awful fragment of stories such as one about a prisoner being beheaded in front of him for the crime of stealing food.

I strongly believe that if more people followed my fathers lead and didn't pass down what are sometimes centuries old hatreds onto their children and grandchildren, we wouldn't have so many intractable conflicts such as those in the Middle East.

Safety during hand to gland combat

So in my Sunday newspaper (The Observer) today there is an article about fertility clinics and in particular the 'mens room' where they get to provide a sample of the appropriate liquid.

What caught my eye, is a picture taken inside one of the rooms that shows a large orange toggle with a notice next to it proclaiming:

Only use this cord in the case of an emergency please.

So what exactly would constitute an emergency while you are engaged in such an activity? Possibly a hand slipping off the end and punching yourself in the nose, or perhaps 'shooting' yourself in the eye at the end of it or maybe trapping a key part of your anatomy in your zip ala Something About Mary.

I do know that nothing short of being in imminent mortal danger would encourage me to pull that toggle and suffer the humiliation of having a crash medical team descend on the room to find me with my trousers around my ankles, member in one hand and plastic cup in the other.

And the Beta goes on...

While I am big fan of some of Google's products such as Earth and Gmail, and I am fairly certain that they probably possess one of the largest concentrations of software talent to be found anywhere on earth, I have to take issue with one contribution they have made to the world of software development, namely the 'never ending' Beta.

In my 17+ years of professional experience of software development experience I had always been led to believe that there was a simple straightforward and common sense progression in the life of a software 'release'. First you have an Alpha version where you are still flushing out a final feature list, then you release the Beta version, feature complete but still buggy. You might then follow that with RC's or Release Candidates until you have the bugs down to a sufficient point that you are happy to ship the product.

Google have screwed this all up.

A case in point, at aSmallWorld (the company I work for) earlier in the year we replaced a search feature in our busiest area (the forums) with a dedicated search engine called Sphinx. Sphinx is a great product (I cant say enough good things about Andew Aksyonoff the developer who has been a great help) but at the time it was in 'Beta'. Of course this lead to discussions about whether we should use a 'Beta' product for such a key feature of the site. That meant that I had to understand what being Beta meant for Sphinx, a question that pre-Google would never have needed to be asked.

I now use Zooomr Beta, Gmail Beta and I am writing this blog on Blogger Beta.

So my message to Google and all you Beta lovers is at some point you have to get of the metaphorical 'pot' and ship your product. Either that or redefine what Alpha means....

Advice for iPod addicts

I will preface this by saying I am a huge music fan, I play music constantly in my car and while I work, I dont however use an iPod and refuse to buy one, and heres why:

- If you live in a large city (or even if you don't) you are making yourself an easy target for muggers, thieves, and even sexual assault (especially if you are lady). Being wrapped up in your own little world of the iPod does not allow you to be fully aware of your surroundings and goes against one of the most basic tenets of self-defence
- You are going to suffer hearing loss in 20/30 years time. Hearing loss takes many years for its effect to be apparent and playing music directly into the ears especially at high-volume has been proven to be extremely damaging. If you have to wear ear-phones get traditional ones preferably of the 'open-ear' type.
- If your a guy trying to pick up women (or vice-versa) you are making a difficult proposition even harder. Wearing an iPod while you might think it labels you as 'cool' and 'current' it also labels you as someone who wants to be left alone, in fact trying to have even a normal discussion (as I tried to recently) with someone in a gym is impossible when every 5 secs they have to take their earphones out.

One final thought. If you bought your iPod to make a statement about your individuality, now that we are reaching the end of 2006, and Apple have sold almost 40 million iPods how individual are you REALLY being....

Release the inner artist

I have had many discussions with friends about the merits of websites like Flickr, Zooomr(the one I use), YouTube, and software such as Photoshop and GarageBand or Sony ACID if you are Windooze person.

The argument is always about whether anything good comes out of putting the power of these tools into the average persons hands. Has art improved? Has society benefited?

If you look for example at the majority of pictures posted on Flickr or Zooomr, most are poorly taken. If you look at a lot of the videos on YouTube they often barely make the grade as entertainment, let alone art.

However I am very much for the personal artistic freedom these tools give us. If you think about it, since the middle-ages or possibly earlier anyone could pickup a brush or pencil and create a work of art, so its been open to everyone and yet we have still managed to have the likes of DaVinci and Monet. Now if back then painting required the equivalent of what is today a laptop, perhaps we would not have seen their likes since a lot of great artists were horribly poor during their lifetime.

Today you can buy a laptop and put a few hundreds pounds worth of software on it and create music that 20 years ago would've taken a multi-million pound professional studio.

And music is wherein lies the interesting thing about this development. In the past being noticed artistically was always a difficult and time consuming if not expensive process, which often required going through 'gatekeepers' such as record companies to get noticed, and we all know how much record companies care about quality vs the bottom line. Now it doesn't have to be.

Is that a bad thing?

In my opinion, no. Its really just the democratization of art.

I am looking a little 'puffy' this morning?


Its a given that fashion is a cyclical industry and sooner or later those horrible flares/platform shoes/sweater dresses/leg warmers that you wore in the 60's/70's or 80's will come around again. This morning however I discovered that a look that hadn't been in fashion since probably the 1700's has disturbingly crept into some idiot designers catalogue, namely the ruffled(puffy) shirt.

As my girlfriend pointed out, a lot of mens designer wear that she sees in magazines these days looks incredibly 'gay' on the models that wear them, but nothing in my mind looks quite as gay as a ruffled shirt. The ONLY people who are going to carry this one off are either complete flamers, ageing Adam Ant fans or Errol Flyn were he still alive. Ironically enough the designer is one Alexander McQueen and if you really want one you can buy it here at Bergdorf Goodman.

There was a great episode of Seinfeld once called 'The Puffy Shirt' which really explains it all, there was also another called 'The Outing' and I would like to point out that while I consider the ruffled shirt to be very gay there really isn't anything wrong with that.

Friends Disjointed


There is a site very familiar in the U.K. (probably not as much so in the U.S.) called friendsreunited. Started by a couple here back in 2000 and sold to the television organization ITV in 2005 for 120 million ($200 million). I had joined the site in its early days of 2001 because I was curious about old school friends and was planning to go back to Wales (from California) for a couple of weeks to help myself mentally recover from a tough period.

So having not been on the site for almost 5 years I had to dig around to remember the email address I registered with (all the while thanking Gmail for fact that my current personal address will now live on long after I shuffle of this mortal coil) and after 5 or 6 tries I was finally able to log on and just couldn't believe how awful it has become. It is an unintelligible mess of ads and banners and I suppose is what happens when an old media company decides to buy into 'new' media and has no idea what to do with it.

Of course the other way this works is an old media company such as a newspaper decides they need to build their own online presence to deal with faltering circulation, and they end up with the mess that was my local newspaper when I lived in California, The Ventura County Star.

So the moral is MySpace users beware... oh but thats right MySpace already IS an unintelligible mess...