Magic Word

My new mobile phone has voice control. This is nothing really new but the latest incarnation is quite cool; you need record a so-called "Magic Word" and, when it's switched into Magic Word voice control mode, you just need to say the aforesaid word and the phone starts listening more intently for further commands like "Fiona" "Home" at which point it phones my wife at home, "Busy" tells it to pretend I'm busy if I don't want to answer an incoming call and "Answer" does the opposite, as you would expect. There are other control words, but you get the picture.

But I'm troubled by all this techno-wonderment. I feel like I need a really good Magic Word. It has to be something that I'm not going find myself saying very often otherwise the phone will chirp into active voice control mode every few minutes thus killing the battery but besides that, I can't help but think that the Magic Word should be cool sounding too.

"Abracadabra" sounds lame, but what about something like "Engage!" or "Systems Activate!", "Mission Control", "Data, do you read me?"

The voice control words should also sound less staccatto, I should use "Get me Fiona" instead of just "Fiona", but the "Get me" part may confuse the phone's voice-rec if every contact name has it prepended.

The sequence; "Data, are you there?, --Bleep-- "Get me Fiona" just sounds the biz-niz to my geek sensibilities.

Magic Word suggestions on a post-card...

Flash Consumption

I don't know if this has been thought of before but, inspired by a work related conversation yesterday about OLAP and data mining where a colleague mentioned that he wondered what the data & trend analysts at his local supermarket would have made of the fact that he once found himself purchasing a shelf at 1.30 in the morning, the concept of subverting consumer statistics - for fun - appeals to me.

The idea of creating unpredictable blips in consumer analysis reports strikes a chord in both a naughty, mischevious way, but also in the sense that it attempts to kick-back at or subvert of the culture of mass consumerism we find ourselves in today.

Such activities would, of course, have to involve the organised purchasing of low cost items as an order to rush out and buy a Learjet may not generate much participation, but I can imagine flash-mob style messages going out accross a town, country or globally instructing participants to simultaneously purchase a single roll of sellotape, some bagels and pasta-shells, all at precisely 2.39am every tuesday for a month.

Then watch them trying to identify some lifestyle trend anlysis from that monster blip. OLAP schmolap.

Little Brother Is Watching You

Orwell was wrong about more than just the year. 2003 is a perverse rendition of 1984 where we, the proles, happen to be the Thought Police and Big Brother rolled into one with our plague of weblogs, relentlessly reporting everything we see, do and think to the authorities every single day.

Our democratized, capitalist societies functioned well enough when their peoples were disconnected from each other. Governments covered-up, news stories were hushed, the truth was 'managed' for us and this was all done with the best of intentions, all for our own good. But now the totalitarian, Web empowered Little Brother exposes the naked truth before the news managers have even answered their ringing cell-phones. And Little Brother isn't a lone voice which can be easily silenced. He's a thousand voices a second, in a thousand separate locations. Little Brother is Big Brother.