The Longest Day

OK, sorry about the MIA. The last two days have been filled with high-stakes RL work stuff. Fortunately for yours truly, the dice rolled high.

Anyway, I retired to my serene Warwickshire hotel room at 1am this morning after a great channel conference we staged where I didn't fluff my lines (much) and PowerPoint kinda worked most of the day. And I've just arrived home in Northampton at 8.30am and by midday today I'll be at Heathrow. By 4pm PST today I'll be in Seattle and at 8am Thursday (tomorrow - FFS) morning I'm on duty 1 Microsoft Way, Redmond. A somewhat challenging schedule, some might say.

I'm banking on Seattle, of all the places in the world, to be reasonably WIFI'd up, so I should be blogging soon-ish.

So, you have been warned America, stay in your homes, close all your windows and, whatever you do, don't answer the telephone. I am on my way, watch Wall St. fall on its arse anytime soon.

Giving Technology The Finger

I just got my new WiFi iPAQ today, replete with biometric fingerprint recognition security. Feels like I'm in a movie every time I switch it on and swipe my index finger to log in. Very cool.

Someone's going to have to cut off my finger to get at my diary or play Solitaire now. Slightly over the top, but I'll let you know how it goes working with biometric security. It's gotta be the future, all this nonsense about keying in PIN codes and passwords. I use pretty much the same, albeit unguessably obscure password for almost every web service I'm with, apart from the one's where money is involved. If you get my password you've pretty much got me.

In ten years they'll look back at us now and laugh at how unsecure and insecure we were.

Life Through A Webcam Lens

Last week I accidentally found a webcam picture of a restaurant in Bali which was taken at precisely the moment Fiona and I were eating there in April 2000, we were sitting out of shot so you can't actually see us, but I've checked my personal digitial photos time and date stamps. We were there.

But it got me thinking this morning about contextualising historical events through the contemporary, pixilated view of a webcam with its constricted field of view and random placement, and so I got the idea to make these photos up to show you what I was thinking. In particular I like the strange, distorted feeling of recency you get when you look at these.

Almost a year ago I blogged about a similar effect I felt when using Google Groups to look at old news items but presented in a modern Windows XP browser interface. Digital information or images don't carry with them the sense of timeliness you get when you look at their traditional counterparts like an old newspaper reprint for instance, where stories and images are presented in the correct context, surrounded by the advertising of the age which contributes and helps the reader to recognise an authentic context.

Mouse over each image for the descriptions, the individual times and dates are accurate.