I returned home early the other day to discover I'd forgotten to pick up my house keys and that Fiona was out. So, sitting parked up outside our front door I took out my notebook and scoured around for an open WiFi access point, and duly found one. One of my less security concious neighbours leaves his connection open and connected to the web. What a nice chap, inadvertantly. Don't even know who he is, the access point was just called Linksys. Wardrivewaying.
Digital Lifestyles
Why Men Don't Listen To Women Reading Maps
Last year I was recommended by Tom Peters (well actually, when I say I, what I really mean is I and 200 other people sitting listening to Tom Peters talk) to read Why Men Don't Listen And Women Can't Read Maps.
It's a great read, funny and insightful without being too heavy.
Tom Peters referenced the book in his talk to make a point about the importance of women as an often overlooked yet highly valuable (and powerful) market demographic. In short, most advertising and commerce is designed and conducted with a male target bias. Tom says this is wrong, I agree.
Moreover, it says that men and women don't simply respond differently to things on a socially conditioned basis; like fluffy pink dolls stuff versus hard metallic blue gun/death stuff. We're biologically wired up differently. These differences manifest themselves in various ways, not least the propensity for men to not listen (mostly to women) and for women to be particularly bad at reading maps.
So, you'll forgive my wry smile when I caught myself the other day - for the umpteenth time I might add - failing to follow audible directions given to me by the female voice that sits inside the Satnav system in my car. Either I'll drift off in thought, be distracted by something or other and before I know it, I'm heading off in the wrong direction having completely missed or ignored the repeated audible directions like "Turn left in 200 yards" issued forth in a rather proper English accented female voice.
There's clearly some kind of karmic gender law that's being broken here. Either that, or sexy female voiced Satnav systems (until recently found mostly in big, butch cars for men) is a fantastically ironic in-joke.
Which I just got.
It's a great read, funny and insightful without being too heavy.
"A woman knows her children's friends, hopes, dreams, secret fears, what they are thinking, how they are feeling. Men are vaguely aware of some short people also living in the house." (Extract from "Why Men Don't Listen And Women Can't Read Maps" by Barbara & Allan Pease)
Tom Peters referenced the book in his talk to make a point about the importance of women as an often overlooked yet highly valuable (and powerful) market demographic. In short, most advertising and commerce is designed and conducted with a male target bias. Tom says this is wrong, I agree.
Moreover, it says that men and women don't simply respond differently to things on a socially conditioned basis; like fluffy pink dolls stuff versus hard metallic blue gun/death stuff. We're biologically wired up differently. These differences manifest themselves in various ways, not least the propensity for men to not listen (mostly to women) and for women to be particularly bad at reading maps.
So, you'll forgive my wry smile when I caught myself the other day - for the umpteenth time I might add - failing to follow audible directions given to me by the female voice that sits inside the Satnav system in my car. Either I'll drift off in thought, be distracted by something or other and before I know it, I'm heading off in the wrong direction having completely missed or ignored the repeated audible directions like "Turn left in 200 yards" issued forth in a rather proper English accented female voice.
There's clearly some kind of karmic gender law that's being broken here. Either that, or sexy female voiced Satnav systems (until recently found mostly in big, butch cars for men) is a fantastically ironic in-joke.
Which I just got.
Tapping Fingers, Looking At My Watch
Will someone PLEASE hurry up and release a personal video recorder that allows me to rip all of my DVD's down to DivX (as formats go, DivX is to movies what MP3 is to music) to enable me to watch any one of my proper, official, legit, paid for movies whenever I want from one central device.
Like my iPod allows. Or iTunes. But, obviously, this device would need to sit next to my TV. There are a few ancestor or early descendant products currently on or coming to the market, but...
So, a 400GB DivX PVR with ethernet (802.11g would be cool) which can auto-rip-and-encode my DVD movie collection (quickly would also be nice) for about £300-£500 please.
Thus far, this new Kiss DP-608 is the closest but still cigarless since the hard disk capacity is poxy, network play requires a Windows PC at the other end, and no direct movie ripping.
OK, You can buy some additional software for NAS devices like my new LinkStation to negate the need for a Windows PC server and you can manually rip DVD's, but still it's not good enough yet. B-
Same goes for the current generation of big f**k-off LCD TVs which will all be redundant in about 2-3 years when HDTV gets going. So, my plea to all us pre-emptive laggards like me, keep your money in your pockets until they get their collective finger out. Maybe a big disk, G5 spec Mac Mini around the back end of this year will do the trick?
Or is this future product merely a pipedream, destined not even to make it onto this list?
Like my iPod allows. Or iTunes. But, obviously, this device would need to sit next to my TV. There are a few ancestor or early descendant products currently on or coming to the market, but...
I recall back in the good old bad old days of 1997 when I first discovered the MP3 format, and you had to manually rip and encode MP3's, and on my then lowly CD-ROM drive, it took hours to rip a single CD and about a minute or two to encode a track into an MP3. Times have moved on since, but will it really take another five years to attain the same level of smoothability with movies and video? Hope not.Hard disks are too small at 80GB Those PVRs with big enough hard disks e.g. 400GB, operate and encode in a proprietary format, e.g. not DivX, and won't rip DVD movies directly anyway. See next point They don't rip DVD's in the effortless way you can rip CD's into MP3's, meaning you have to rip and encode on a PC and then transfer. Major arseache They have network ports -good- but which only work if you connect them to a PC with host software running -bad-. How about enabling them to link directly to a NAS or external USB/Firewire hard disk (without having to own, let alone switch on a PC host).
So, a 400GB DivX PVR with ethernet (802.11g would be cool) which can auto-rip-and-encode my DVD movie collection (quickly would also be nice) for about £300-£500 please.
Thus far, this new Kiss DP-608 is the closest but still cigarless since the hard disk capacity is poxy, network play requires a Windows PC at the other end, and no direct movie ripping.
OK, You can buy some additional software for NAS devices like my new LinkStation to negate the need for a Windows PC server and you can manually rip DVD's, but still it's not good enough yet. B-
Same goes for the current generation of big f**k-off LCD TVs which will all be redundant in about 2-3 years when HDTV gets going. So, my plea to all us pre-emptive laggards like me, keep your money in your pockets until they get their collective finger out. Maybe a big disk, G5 spec Mac Mini around the back end of this year will do the trick?
Or is this future product merely a pipedream, destined not even to make it onto this list?