Christmas Nostalgia

What will be the "must have" toy this Christmas? I don't know, and as the young people for whom I have to buy presents no longer consider themselves as "children", I am no longer interested.

This clamour by children for that one gift they cannot live without is nothing new. I remember one year I pestered the heck out of my parents for Santa to bring me an Etch-a-Sketch. I was beguiled by the TV adverts which showed the magical appearance of artistic masterpieces by twiddling only two cream knobs. Sadly my juvenile fumblings never managed to create anything more sophisticated than a rather poor rendition of a staircase, achieved by making equal, alternate turns with the left and right knobs.

What I was good at was turning the device upside down and shaking all the iron filings back onto the screen. So good and so enthusiastic in fact that I managed to shake one corner on to the head of a younger cousin, opening up a gash which required a dash to A&E and a few stiches to staunch the flow. Following that little incident I never saw my precious toy again.

It was therefore with mixed feelings and a disturbing flashback that I came across a virtual online rendition of Etch-a-sketch. My drawing skills have undergone no improvement, and the shaking and been eradicated but a simple press of the space bar. Fun though!

Tony 160

Well, it seems the Text the PM session I wrote about last week had been a success. OK, now read that line again, remember the person at the centre of the event, and apply your own spin filters to the word success.

Nearly 7,000 questions were submitted by the public either by SMS or WAP. Margherita Taylor from Capital FM selected 30 of these questions which she put direct to the PM in an interview transmitted live from No 10 on O2 Active - a live WAP service. There was a mixture of serious political questions - Iraq, future of Northern Ireland - and also some more light hearted questions, such as the PM's favourite guitar solo, and views on the new Band Aid single.

It is hard to imagine anyone as verbose as Tony Blair ever being able to compress all his non-answers into anything as brief as 160 characters. Well tax your imagination no longer - he didn't. He had a whole team of typists turned editors to compress his meandering doublespeak into something pithy. I wonder if the editing wasn't a little too severe as these extracts from the transcript show...

Nathalie> Why not completely ban smoking in public places? What has the presence of food in a pub got to do with it?
PM> I think it's a sensible compromise.

Boby> Is Britain prepared for a terrorist attack?
PM> As prepared as we can be, the security services are doing a great job.

Well that's all right then, we can sleep soundly tonight. But perhaps my favourite example of not answering a direct question is the following..

Voodoo> Would you trust your wife to run the country?
PM> Well fortunately that's not a question that's arising!

Erm wrong Tony, the question just did arise and you have failed to answer it - but then why change a habit of a lifetime? Mind you I imagine things were a little frosty at the Blair supper table last night. I wonder how Tony explained that little avoidance to "her indoors" or if he managed to sidestep the question quite so effectively when face to face with his missus.

If you want to see a more representative example of the length of responses given by the leader of the Hair Blair Bunch^TM (see pic) he has recently been interviewed for Oxford student magazine Isis.

Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus......

....Sapientum is From Jupiter

You are exuberantly curious - and you love to explore newness. Enthusiastic and optimistic, you get a kick out of stimulating intellectual discussions. Foreign cultures and languages fascinate you. You love the outdoors, animals, and freedom. Chances are you tend to exaggerate, so try to keep a lid on that. If you do, you'll continue to be known for your confidence, generosity, and sense of justice.

Secret Santa Strikes Again

I just joined. Have you?

The idea of Secret Santa is very simple - you pull a name out of a hat and buy that person a present. Your name is in the hat as well, so someone buys you a present too! Everyone gets a present! Everyone's happy!

Children in Aspic

Well, tonight is the BBC's annual charity telethon hosted by Wogan and Roslin. All over the country, this apparently gives license to people who like to dress up and guilt-trip complete strangers into donating money to the cause.

My charitable giving is planned and part of my personal budget. I give regularly to my chosen charities and causes and most professional charity workers are prepared to accept this when they greet me on the street. However, I do object however to being berated in public, as I was earlier this morning by a be-wigged loon in a comedy costume rattling a bucket in my face, when I refused to dip my hand in my pocket.

I know this is all very worthy, but I am one of those people who believes that a person does not have to make a complete public arse of themselves or succumb to the idle threats and disapproving stares of the self-appointed guardians of the nation's morals in order to be doing your bit for those less fortunate.

Rant over!

TXT A PM

Well, well, well! It appears that Tony is getting cool and down with the kids. It has been announced that he will be participating in a live mobile phone text chat with the public on Thursday 25th November 2004.

According to the press release:

Members of the public will be able to submit questions in advance from today by text message or picture message. Owners of WAP enabled phones will be able to enter the chatroom on the day to put questions to the PM.

People can submit up to 5 questions each in the chat room and the Prime Minister has said:

"Every week I take questions from MPs. This is the chance for everyone else to use their mobile phones to ask me the questions they want answered."

Note he has not said he answers questions from MPs or that he will actually answer the questions from the public. That would be just too much like a stretch for the master of spin and subterfuge.

It seems that O2, the network hosting the chat, has written to Rt Hon Michael Howard MP, Leader of the Opposition, and Rt Hon Charles Kennedy MP, Leader of the Liberal Democrats, to invite them to take part in future chats.

This Site is a Winner

My winning streak seems to be ongoing and my successes are coming from the most unexpected places.

Welcome to you if you have arrived here from the ComputerActive blog. You are most welcome, please take time to have a good look around and read all the archives. There are almost two years of these so it might take you a while but you will see how my blogging style has changed (matured?) in the time since I wrote my first entry.

For regular readers, let me explain.

About a month ago I was browsing through the pages of ComputerActive when I came across an interesting article about Blogging. I am always interested to see how the topic is explained by the press, and the article in question was explaining the phenomenon and technology to their putative blogger readers. At the end of the article was a small section mentioning a competition for the best reader blog. I happened to have a couple of minutes on my hands so I entered and blow me down, I won!!!!

According to an email I received this morning, a bag of computer goodies are headed my way. That's is nice, but just the satisfaction that my little blog won out of "the hundreds...who sent in links to...online diaries". Makes me really proud.

Excuse me while I just to a little winner's dance around the office.

Smoking Ban Public Vote

Yesterday the UK health secretary, John Reid, outlined the government's plans to ban smoking in restaurants and pubs which sell hot food.

Now anyone in the UK who owns a mobile phone can have their views recognised using an SMS voting system which has been set up to gauge the TRUE public opinion on the proposed ban.

They system has been designed to show the percentages of those that approve or not with a further split between smokers and non-smokers.

Participants can text SMOKING BANUS / SMOKING BANTHEM or SMOKING ALLOWUS / SMOKING ALLOWTHEM to 60300 and the results of the survey are immediately posted on a website which monitors the votes and presents them as a simple bar chart.

Each text costs 25p with 5p plus VAT going to an unspecified cancer charity.

Now What?

Sapientum is 2 years old today! To be perfectly honest I never expected it to last this long.

I cannot remember the first blog I read, but I can remember the one which finally persuaded me I should give it a try. Sad to say that blog is no more - much mourned by those who used to visit for a daily update.

As I browse around the blogosphere I frequently find writings which are brilliantly executed, stylish to look at and entertaining to read. The capacity for bloggers to relate their lives to an unseen public audience and on a daily basis never ceases to amaze me.

It was never my intention to make blogging a daily task. I only ever intended it to be a place for occasional thoughts to be deposited, interesting links filed, and photos shared with anyone who cared to drop by.

I have never specifically told anyone to look at my site. I have exchanged links with other bloggers, participated in memes, joined directories, but my intention was, and still is, that people should discover Sapientum in the same way as I discover other blogs myself. And yet in its heyday of February 2004, this blog was entertaining over 2000 visitors a month without trying.

Of late I have neglected the blog a little while I have been focussed on other projects, and readership has declined as a result. Nevertheless it is still a labour of love and as long as people keep coming to read, I will continue to publish.

Now, what to write today.......?

Beam Me Up Scotty

Some trekkie-head just spent £274 on a one-off Federation Communicator sold on ebay.

Part of me thinks that the little device, which connects via Bluetooth to any mobile phone, is quite cool. Judging from the pictures some real workmanship went into putting the device together. It is just the sort of thing I might have bid for myself in one of my more impulsive moments. The other part of me thinks that at nearly three hundred quid it is an awful lot of money so shell out for something which can never be repaired or replaced.

Culture Shox

I enjoy the process of hunting for music. Music, that I have heard on the radio, or in a club. Sometimes I will hunt for months, even years, to track down a rare recording or an illusive deleted track. Ebay has certainly made the process easier of late but the thrill is in tracking down little bits of information - or hearing it again and finally getting the name and artist details in full.

I especially like finding tracks which are virtually unknown, but then later turn into global hits. It happened earlier this year with "Happy" by Max Sedgley, which I first heard on an internet radio station back in April, and then became huge when it was selected as the official title music for ITV's Euro 2004 football championship coverage in July.

Now it has happened again with a track I heard on Austrian radio station FM4 while I was ski-ing there last January. On that occasion I had the name of the track, the name of the artist, and the name of the album from which it came. My challenge was finding a shop which could actually sell it to me. I hunted high and low in London - with the owners of the more trendy record shops in Soho looking at me as if I had grown an extra ear when I handed them the slip of data which contained all the details. Eventually I had to buy it mail order from a German dance music specialist store. The odd thing about that is the artist is actually English but only releases their stuff on a German label.

When one has spent that long looking for a track, one becomes sensitive to it whenever it is played. I was working in my office the other evening with the TV on in the other room, when I suddenly heard that track which had eluded me for so long. I rushed between the rooms only to see the tail end of the ad.

The advert was for Nike Shox and featured a man chasing a hot dog trolley down the hills Lisbon, Portugal. There in the background is Balkan Hot Step by N.O.H.A or Noise of Human Art which is off the Next Plateau album - an album full of other great tracks.

I now expect that the Balkan Hot Step will become the dancefloor filler over the Christmas period, and each time it is played I will know that I heard and found it over a year earlier.

If only the BBC knew of my prowess for spotting a hit that far in advance. C'mon Andy Parfitt, the real savior of Radio One is waiting for your call...........

10x10 24x7

I have blogged before on the Wordcount technology, developed by Jonathan Harris, which lets you inspect the usage frequency of common English words. Now he has taken that same idea and applied it to the visual world.

In 10x10 he uses the word counting technology to analyse the data archives of Reuters, BBC, and NYT stories, finding the words and images most common during a one-hour period, and reproducing these in a ten-by-ten grid.

Every time you access the page the images change and the effect produced looks alot like the ever changing montage of TV pictures which flicker behind the newsreaders on SkyNews.

Nearly Half of America is Sorry

Fifty-two percent of America have just proudly re-appointed her "reckless, incompetent and corrupt government".

The other 48% are aghast, dismayed and really, really sorry.

Recharging