Techiedog-blog

On a wander around town yesterday, and the usually visitations to a series of purveyors of consumer electronics, a started to take an interest in the range of DAB digital radios which are currently available on the high street. Am I the only person of the opinion that the design of the DAB units are universally awful! What is it about wood paneling, bulbous 1950's retro styling or 60s modernistic design that offer themselves as the winning look for manufactures. As for leather binding ........ I mean, some of these units are truly hideous. Just exactly which type of household are these things supposed to fit in? I can only come to the conclusion that there is either: a) A desire to make the technology less daunting for users by making them look old fashioned b) An attempt to make the devices 'date' even more rapidly in an attempt to stimulate further sales. A report last month suggested the digital radio sales were set to boom - really, looking like this...

The first snow of the season fell here yesterday afternoon. So, I know I'm a 'grown up', but I can't help but get excited by such things. My Dad always said that people loose the wonder and excitement of snow fall once they have to start commuting to work. I'm lucky, if I look at the window and the roads are impassable, I don't have to bother heading off to the office. Thanks to the technology of my trade home working is habitual anyway. Is technology responsible for allowing me to keep a sense of wonder, and enjoy the vagaries of mother nature for what she is, rather than seeing her meteorological mood swings only in terms the effect of my daily grind. Maybe, or maybe I'm just an entry level weather geek! Whatever, come lunchtime I'm off to take Monty the dog out to play in the snow!

One of the great things about my job is that I get to meet people who are smart, interesting, inspiring, legendary, (at least in some circles), challenging and from time to time some or all of the above. Yesterday my colleagues and I (all four of us) spent a few illuminating hours with Ted Nelson. He immediately endeared himself to me be mentioning his LP and his claim (as yet undisputed apparently) to have written and staged the first Rock Musical. I raised a rye smile as I considered my own album releases and the unfinished Punk Rock Musical project I've been chipping away at in odd moments over the last five or six years. Ted Nelson has been called "one of the most influential contrarians in the history of the information age." ( Edwards, 1997 ), and I can see why. Ted declared himself "Poet, Philosopher and Rogue" at the age of 16, a description I'd say holds true to this day and is probably as apposite a semantic tag as one might hope to find...

At the risk of turning this into a very iPod centric blog I have to comment on this , the most ghastly of pseudo cool iCrap - the Apple iPod Sock. Nooooooooooooooooooo! I made my own:

I've now got a 'Sound track' section in the side bar, over there ---> somewhere. This displays the music I'm currently listening to (last five tracks) or at least the music I'm listening to on with iTunes on any of my Windows PC's running .net framework!!! I guess we'll have to wait for my colleague's dreams to come to fruition in order to blog everything that hits my ears, regardless of source! I've been fiddling with this idea for a few months now my initial experiments worked but I was relying on poking http Post through a browser from a desk top JavaScript - needless to say that, although the monitoring was spot on, it was less than desirable to spawn a new browser instance everytime a new track was played. But now I found iTunesBlogger , a nifty little C# app. I've caught the output from the app with an ASP script and iFramed it into the blog template. I also write an RSS(ish) feed to my server but haven't got around to do...

BBC NEWS | Business | How to make money from ideas : "How to make money from ideas Opinion By Anne Miller Inventor Anne Miller Ms Miller: 'R&D is the most important sector within the $2.2 trillion global creative economy' As part of the East of England's Space for Ideas initiative, inventor Anne Miller, who has registered more than 30 patents during the last 20 years, celebrates Britain's creative minds and asks why the UK is so lousy at making money from them. The British are recognised internationally as being highly creative. The workshop of the world may have long since disintegrated, but the UK still has the scientists, the engineers and the creatives to watch out for. Our problem is that we ourselves often fail to recognise this strength, and most importantly, we are let down by a lack of understanding of how to convert ideas into commercial successes...." Interesting article, articluating a lot of the frustrations I recognise ...