Cloud Number Nine

One day, hopefully not too far in the future, our mobile phone address books will be connected to the Web and, on top of being able to store all our precious telephone contact numbers in one central webby location, we'll also be able to look up numbers of people or businesses we don't know, dispensing entirely with the sixties-style human based directory enquiries services we all know and love and who rip you off everytime you use them to do dead easy stuff for you like type a name into a computer enquiry screen.

The question is when?

What Evil Lies At The End Of Holly Bush Lane?

My car has a satellite navigation computer which has helped me out on numerous occasions given my relatively limited knowledge of the local geography of southern England, having only lived here for a couple of years.

However, it's not 100% perfect. There are a couple of glitches as far as its understanding the entire length of the M1 motorway is concerned and it repeatedly instructs me to exit at the wrong junction every time I traverse north on the M1 from London, heading home.

Having said that I have learned to trust it more often than not, even when it appears to be sending me in the wrong direction or when my instinctive sense of direction would lead me another way. Most of the time 'Betty', as I like to call her, gets it right and she has saved me enormous amounts of time finding places I'd never find in a month of Sundays. But the other day she abused my trust and left me confused and more than a little spooked.

En route to a certain destination I found myself being guided by Betty down an increasingly odd sequence of twists and turns that contradicted my own sense of where we should have been heading. But as I said above, I've learned to trust her and I know to let her just lead the way and so that is what I did. Shortly afterwards we turned off the main road and entered Holly Bush Lane which was a single track road which and the further along it I travelled, the more off-road the conditions became. All signs of civilisation slowly drew back into the distance and a well weathered and beaten up old caravan appeared to my right and whilst it was in poor condition, it looked as if it was habitable; moreover its door lay ominously open, I thought.

I began to question the sense in continuing down what was an increasingly strange route but, trusting Betty, I decided to continue onwards. Such were the road conditions beneath me, I was barely able to move along more quickly than 5mph, weaving left and right, up and down through what seemed like a million pot-holes in the now dusty and increasingly more broken up track below.

Betty barked at me, "Straight On!" as her screen read "3/4 Mile" to the next turning instruction which very, very slowly then became "1/2 Mile" as we crept further and further down Holly Bush Lane.

All that stretched out in front of me was the same featureless dusty track with not a soul in sight and I noticed it was couched in ever-thickening bushes and trees that seemed to creep closer and closer to the centre of the track ahead of me. It was not a welcoming sight.

As the gravel crackled under my tyres as we drove towards the end of the lane I thought about what horrors would I find waiting for me at the end of Holly Bush Lane.

Images flashed across my mind of a lost community of savages, reminiscent of Mad Max's Thunderdome but populated instead by missing business executives who had also been tricked by their evil SatNav systems long before me, only to find themselves trapped forever in a SatNav black hole and forced to live off the land, sitting around from dusk to dawn in their Recaro bucket seats, hunched around a camp-fire for warmth, ravenous and waiting for the next hapless victim to arrive with the fresh promise of some half eaten sandwich crusts or perhaps a luxurious tin of boiled sweets in the glove compartment.

Or would I find hell on earth filled with burned out BMW's, Merc's and other tricked out executive cars, with their owners long since extracted and consumed by some evil force that lived off the fattened torsos of capitalist pigs and 800lb board-room gorillas.

Suddenly the trance that had consumed me lifted and in a flash I slammed on the brakes and the car skidded sharply to a halt, crunching the gravel beneath. "Straight On!" ordered Betty, in a tone that sounded more fraught than usual. There was only a 1/4 mile to go before the end of Holly Bush Lane. We sat motionless for a few moments before I slowly found the sense to reach out towards the SatNav Off button and push it in. My hands still shaking, I then fumbled for the gear stick, hurriedly selected reverse then headed back down the lane in the direction from which I had come.

But to this day I feel a calling, something is drawing me back to Holly Bush Lane and I'm curious to know what's down there, and maybe one day I'll find out or, if not me, then maybe whoever takes ownership of Betty after me. I should warn them about Holly Bush Lane.

The Geek Gene

I?ve been wondering if being a geek is a genetic thing, you know, if there is actually a gene that makes you behave a geek. If, like me, you find that you just can?t stop yourself from doing geeky things then it?s almost certainly genetic, so stop fighting it and just succumb to the power of the geek side.

Like all genetic geeks I love to make geeky things happen and so I've been experimenting lately with geeky solutions involving my new

HP iPAQ 5450

. It's got Bluetooth wireless (and 802.11b WiFi) which allows it to connect passively with my cell phone, meaning I don't have faff about to line it up for an old-tech infra-red connection, nor do I have to manually intervene to get it to connect up to the net, it just does it automatically. Whether it?s sitting in my pocket, case, dashboard or wherever I leave it lying around, providing of course that it?s in close enough proximity to my cellphone to be in Bluetooth range, about 15-20 feet.

I've been using PDA's ever since my first 16k Psion Organiser clunk-o-matic back in 1988. But the addition of wireless communications is a major step forward in practical and usability terms. You can do much more application-wise with wireless in the mix and I think we?re at a major inflection point in my humble, but exquisitely modest, expert opinion.

Like for instance, during my working week I use a remote e-mail management suite called

Symmetry Pro

which automatically compresses and encrypts all my office based e-mails as they arrive and then dumps them on a secure server over at Symmetry Pro?s HQ. The Pocket PC?s Symmetry Pro client then periodically checks to see if there are any new emails waiting for me and, if so, it downloads them to my iPAQ?s e-mail app at a frequency of my choosing. If you don?t happen to have the often complex and costly tech infrastructure to properly support remote or handheld e-mail users in your business then this is a great workaround solution.

I set-up my iPAQ so that it has a secret Bluetooth love affair with my GPRS enabled cell phone every 30 minutes and it plays the infamous Outlook ?nee-naw? email notify sound or, if I?m in a meeting, discreetly vibrates to let me know whenever I've received any new e-mail. Very cool and infinitely useful for when I'm out of the office. To the extent, in fact, that you can no longer tell if I'm out of the office or not these days since I can always receive and reply to my e-mails all day long, whether I?m in or out.

But today I achieved geek factor 9. I connected the headphone jack of the iPAQ to a car stereo cassette adapter, a simple low-tech piece of kit that enables CD players, MP3 players or anything that has a headphone jack, to connect and play through your car stereo's cassette player. Then with my iPAQ connected to the Internet via the Bluetooth cell phone, I was able to stream live

Shoutcast internet radio

, using a PocketPC app called

GSPlayer

which enabled me listen to US based radio stations through my car stereo. Soooooo cool! [

See pictorial explanation

].

Global time-zone confusion then ensued as the US radio presenter said ??and it?s 2 minutes after 9am? when in fact it was actually 2 minutes after 2pm in the UK. I guess I need to be careful that I don?t start driving on the wrong side of the road.

But anyway, it's when technology loops back in on itself like that, when genetic geeks pathologically seek out brand new applications using all the geeky tech know-how they can muster, that?s when our geek antennae start twitching like crazy and I think that this

must

be genetic. It can't be merely a love for all things geek like some other hobby or interest in stamp collecting or trainspotting. To me it seems like a more basic, fundamental need - a disorder even - in those of us with that critical geek gene.

Look back down the years and you?ll that some of the most revered historical figures were geeks. Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell and Doc Brown from Back To The Future were the geeks of their day, all engaged in extreme-geeking (also known as inventing stuff) to create new geeky ?things? often which the non-geeks initially greeted with a great deal of skepticism ? after all wasn?t the invention of the telephone greeted by the then US President, I forget which, who dismissed its invention by asking why people would ever want to talk to each other if they weren?t in the same room? He obviously never had the Geek gene.

But if all this geek-ness is genetic, it leaves me wondering what Stoneage geeks or Medieval geeks got up to before their latter-day geek descendents got their hands on electricity. There's no such thing as Geek Mythology and there's little evidence of geek behaviour prior to the appearance of the electron apart from the fact, of course, that we all know that cave paintings were an early form of weblog. But beyond that, all that I can seem to imagine about geek influenced technology in the Jurassic period seems to permanently revolve around The Flintstones period with its wall mounted baby dinosaurs used as hand blenders, but I'm sure there must be other examples of ancient geekness.