In the last week, I have used all of the following interpersonal communications technologies. By “used”, I mean actively participated, initiating and responding.

• Voice: Cell phone, Skype VOIP
• Real-time text: Skype IM, Facebook IM
• Narrowcast messaging: Email, LinkedIn, Facebook
• Broadcast messaging: LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, blogging (posting and commenting)

I can’t escape the feeling that a form of Gresham’s Law applies here. The worst part of it is that these technologies differ wildly on how device-neutral they are. Right now Facebook and LinkedIn are very poorly adapted to the iPhone. And any thought of having a “universal inbox” is right out of the window….

Mars Hill is a nice low-key blog run by Paul Burgin over in Baldock (Herts, England). Most of the postings are about British politics, but he also runs an interesting series called “Twenty Questions to a Fellow Blogger”. For the most part, these aren’t the “A list” blogs: they represent the diversity of ordinary people who have found that blogging gives them a way of expressing themselves. People like Andrew Sullivan and David Carr may argue about the relationship if blogging to journalism, but there are plenty of bloggers who have no pretensions to being members of the Fourth Estate. They just want to write.
All of this is a roundabout way of saying that Paul has just posted my “Twenty Questions” interview here. There’s nothing startling or revelatory here: no “25 things you don’t know about me” or other blogmeme stuff. I think that’s why I really enjoyed doing it. Thanks, Paul.

Via Susan Claire at Facebook:

Place an X by all the things you’ve done and remove the X from the ones you have not, then send it to your friends (including me). […]

Well, it’s very US-centric, and I’m not going to tag other people, but I’ll still have a go at this in my blog.
Things you have done during your lifetime:
(X) Gone on a blind date
(X) Skipped school
( ) Watched someone die
(X) Been to Canada
(X) Been to Mexico
(X) Been to Florida
( ) Been to Hawaii
(X) Been on a plane
( ) Been on a helicopter
(X) Been lost
(X) Gone to Washington, DC
(X) Swam in the ocean
(X) Cried yourself to sleep
(X) Played cops and robbers
(X) Recently colored with crayons
( ) Sang Karaoke
(X) Paid for a meal with coins only
( ) Been to the top of the St. Louis Arch
(X) Been to the top of the Empire State Building
(X) Done something you told yourself you wouldn’t.
( ) Made prank phone calls
( ) Been down Bourbon Street in New Orleans
(X) Laughed until some kind of beverage came out of your nose
(X) Caught a snowflake on your tongue
( ) Danced in the rain-naked
( ) Gone skinny dipping
( ) Written a letter to Santa Claus
(X) Been kissed under the mistletoe
(X) Watched the sunrise with someone
(X) Paid it forward
(X) Blown bubbles
( ) Gone ice-skating
(X) Gone to the movies
( ) Been deep sea fishing
( ) Driven across the United States
( ) Been in a hot air balloon
( ) Been sky diving
( ) Gone snowmobiling
(X) Lived in more than one country
(X) Lay down outside at night and admired the stars while listening to the crickets
(X) Seen a falling star and made a wish
( ) Enjoyed the beauty of Old Faithful Geyser
(X) Seen the Statue of Liberty
(X) Gone to the top of Seattle Space Needle
(X) Been on a cruise
(X) Traveled by train
(X) Traveled by motorcycle
( ) Been horseback riding
(X) Ridden on a San Francisco CABLE CAR
(X) Been to Disneyland OR Disney World
( ) Been in a rain forest
(X) Seen whales in the ocean
( ) Been to Niagara Falls
(X) Ridden on an elephant
(X) Ridden on a camel
( ) Swam with dolphins(sea turtles)
( ) Been to the Olympics
( ) Walked on the Great Wall of China
( ) Saw and heard a glacier calf
( ) Been spinnaker flying
( ) Been water-skiing
( ) Been snow-skiing
(X) Been to Westminster Abbey
(X) Been to the Louvre
( ) Been to a bull fight in Spain
(X) Swam in the Mediterranean
(X) Been to a Major League Baseball game
(X) Been to a National Football League game
(X) Been moved to tears
(X) Done something to change someone else’s life

Over at Facebook, my old friend John Sundman displayed his results for this BBC-initiated meme….

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.
Instructions:
1) Look at the list and put an ‘x’ after those you have read ENTIRELY
2) Add a ‘+’ to the ones you LOVE.
3) Star (*) those you plan on reading.
4) Tally your total at the bottom.

Here’s my response:
1 Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen X
2 The Lord of the Rings – JRR Tolkien X+
3 Jane Eyre – Charlotte Bronte X
4 Harry Potter series – JK Rowling X
5 To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee X
6 The Bible X (yes, all of it)
7 Wuthering Heights – Emily Bronte X
8 Nineteen Eighty Four – George Orwell X+
9 His Dark Materials – Philip Pullman X+
10 Great Expectations – Charles Dickens X
11 Little Women – Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles – Thomas Hardy X+
13 Catch 22 – Joseph Heller X+
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (Not all, but most)
15 Rebecca – Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit – JRR Tolkien X+
17 Birdsong – Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye – JD Salinger X
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife – Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch – George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind – Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby – F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House – Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace – Leo Tolstoy *
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams X+
26 Brideshead Revisited – Evelyn Waugh X
27 Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoyevsky *
28 Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck X
29 Alice in Wonderland – Lewis Carroll X+
30 The Wind in the Willows – Kenneth Grahame X+
31 Anna Karenina – Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield – Charles Dickens X+
33 Chronicles of Narnia – CS Lewis (Not all, but this is silly…)
34 Emma – Jane Austen
35 Persuasion – Jane Austen X
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe – CS Lewis X (… because this is one of the “Chronicles of Narnia”)
37 The Kite Runner – Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin – Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha – Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh – AA Milne X+
41 Animal Farm – George Orwell X+
42 The Da Vinci Code – Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney – John Irving
45 The Woman in White – Wilkie Collins X
46 Anne of Green Gables – LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy X+
48 The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood X+
49 Lord of the Flies – William Golding X
50 Atonement – Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi – Yann Martel
52 Dune – Frank Herbert X
53 Cold Comfort Farm – Stella Gibbons X+
54 Sense and Sensibility – Jane Austen X
55 A Suitable Boy – Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind – Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities – Charles Dickens X
58 Brave New World – Aldous Huxley X+
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time – Mark Haddon X
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera – Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men – John Steinbeck
62 Lolita – Vladimir Nabokov X+
63 The Secret History – Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones – Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo – Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road – Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure – Thomas Hardy X+
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary – Helen Fielding X
69 Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick – Herman Melville X+
71 Oliver Twist – Charles Dickens X
72 Dracula – Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden – Frances Hodgson Burnett X
74 Notes From A Small Island – Bill Bryson X
75 Ulysses – James Joyce X+
76 The Bell Jar – Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons – Arthur Ransome X+
78 Germinal – Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair – William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession – AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens X
82 Cloud Atlas – David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple – Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary – Gustave Flaubert X
86 A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web – EB White X
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven – Mitch Alborn
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes – Sir Arthur Conan Doyle X+
90 The Faraway Tree Collection – Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness – Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince – Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory – Iain Banks
94 Watership Down – Richard Adams X
95 A Confederacy of Dunces – John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice – Nevil Shute X
97 The Three Musketeers – Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet – William Shakespeare (As John wrote “Well I haven’t read all of Shakespeare but this gets…) X
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory – Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables – Victor Hugo
Total: 50
This is obviously a “pretentious fiction” list, but there are some puzzling omissions. Where’s Salman Rushdie’s “Satanic Verses”, for example? And I’d be curious to do the same thing for non-fiction. “A Brief History of Time”. Bill Clinton’s autobiography. “Civilization”. That kind of thing….
UPDATE:joined in.

LOL!!!

Genesis@Facebook

Steve tagged me with the “7 Things You May (or May Not) Know About Me” meme. The rules:

• Link to your original tagger(s) and list these rules in your post.
• Share seven facts about yourself in the post.
• Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
• Let them know they’ve been tagged.

Like Steve, I’ve blogged for years, and I’m not sure how many little-known personal facts I can dig up. And there’s a further problem: two years ago (almost exactly) I was tagged with the “5 things” meme. I don’t want to repeat myself, so I’ll have to think up some new things. Here goes:

1. I’m addicted to the British glucose-based drink Lucozade. When I was about six, I was hospitalized with severe whooping cough, and for some time Lucozade was the only thing I could keep down. I prefer it at room temperature, just as it was in hospital.
2. You never forget that ghostly blue light. During the summer of 1971, I had a job in the Theoretical Physics group at AERE Harwell. My “office” was a prefabricated shed, erected in the old aircraft hangar that housed the LIDO “swimming pool” reactor. When I worked late (which I did quite often, the only illumination was my desk lamp and the blue glow from the ÄŒerenkov radiation. (And yes, there were life preservers hanging everywhere, just in case someone fell in.)
3. If it were not for a British TV docu-drama, I would probably not be living in the US today. Back in 1980 I had decided to boost my income by taking a programming job with a petrochemical company in Saudi Arabia. It was a typical expat deal: I was going to live in a company hostel, with my (tax-free) salary paid into a numbered Swiss bank account, and meeting my family for vacations twice a year in Greece or Cyprus. But a few days before I was due to leave, the film Death of a Princess was shown on ATV. Immediately anyone with a British passport became persona non grata in Saudi Arabia. When it became clear that the ban was likely to last for a while, I started looking for alternative jobs, and was recruited by Raytheon Data Systems in Massachusetts.
4. Why am I a Mac user? During 1996 there were rumours that Sun was trying to buy Apple. While any talk of acquisition soon fizzled, contact continued. For most of that year, I was part of a secret team working to integrate the Sun and Apple technology portfolios. Sun was to give up making desktop computers, Apple would abandon its minuscule server business, Solaris would be used as the basis for OS X, and sales and channel strategies would be coordinated. I spent much of my time that year at Apple, working on the networking aspects of the deal. It all unravelled when Steve Jobs returned to Apple at the beginning of 1997; with the NeXT OS technology he had no need for Solaris. Shortly afterwards, Eric Schmidt left Sun to join Novell, before moving to Google a few years later. All I got was a T-shirt, and a PowerBook – but that was enough.
5. Out of the mouths of babes and… In 1982 I was working for Raytheon Data Systems (RDS), a company whose main business was supplying IBM-compatible terminal systems to airlines. One day I was invited to join a meeting that included various VPs and corporate lawyers from IBM and RDS, who were haggling over the licensing terms for an IBM specification. After several hours of fruitless discussion, I said, “Oh, come on. Just give us the spec and we’ll implement it.” All the IBM lawyers promptly got in a huddle. “Are you formally requesting that we turn over the document to you?” they asked. “Well, yes,” I replied, rather surprised. “In that case, we are required by the terms of our consent decree to comply,” they said. And they did. Apparently nobody had thought to simply ask for it.
6. I have been to Buckingham Palace once – for my mother’s OBE investiture. Unfortunately I didn’t take a camera. (This was before digital photography and camera phones.)
7. Me and Ronnie. [Reprinted from an entry in my Sun blog, dated June 11, 2004] While everybody seems to be waxing lyrical (or apoplectic) about Ronald Reagan (and I did like Steve Bell’s cartoon in the Guardian), I was reminded of a personal piece of synchronicity. We had just moved from the UK to the USA (for “just a few years,” we thought – hah!), and it was my first day on the job, at Raytheon Data Systems in Mansfield, Massachusetts. I was joining the team to work on the OS for Raytheon’s next generation minicomputer. It was March 30, 1981, and around 2:30pm, right in the middle of a meeting to get to know the rest of the team, everything stopped: Reagan had just been shot. From my perspective, as an outsider who viewed America as a pathologically gun-obsessed culture, it was an odd moment… what had I let myself in for?

So that’s seven more-or-less new things about me. Now I have to tag seven people. That’s tough. I tagged several people the last time around, and so this time I’m going to pass. Sorry.

If you read xkcd (and if not, why not?), you’ll probably enjoy Abstruse Goose. Today’s comic had me searching Wikipedia for articles on group theory, which I think is a good thing…..

Charlie Stross wonders about what an Internet-age recession is going to look like.

We’ve never actually seen a true global recession in a Web 2.0 world. What’s it going to look like? How is it going to differ from a recession in a pre-internet world? Is it going to accelerate the hollowing-out of the retail high street as economy-conscious shoppers increasingly move to online shopping and comparison systems like Froogle? Are we going to see homeless folks not only living in their cars but telecommuting from them, using pay-as-you-go 3G cellular modems, cheap-ass Netbooks, and rented phone numbers to give the appearance of still having a meatspace office? Is the increasing performance curve of consumer electronics going to give way to a deflationary price war as embattled producers try to hold on to market share as Moore’s Law cuts the ground away from beneath their feet?

This is disingenuous: “We’ve never actually seen a true X in a Web 2.0 world” applies to a vast range of X‘s. But setting that aside, let’s add a few more questions. How will the fact that the recession is coinciding with the retiring of the boomers affect things? What about the (independent and permanent) increase in energy prices? How will this influence agriculture? (Pumping water is expensive.) Will we all move south, live in cities, become vegetarians, and work from home (except for nurses and teachers)?

There’s a really cruel blog-meme going the rounds: list your favourite album for every year of your life. (Bonus points for those you actually own.) Where the hell do you find the data? Various sources, including Amazon.co.uk, have got the number one albums for every year, but the charts only go back to 1956, and few of my favourites ever made it to number one. Wikipedia to the rescue: they have information about every year from 1950 to 2008. So in principle I could use the following procedure: scan each year’s releases in Wikipedia and pick my favourite. Then go through my top hundred or so albums ((My iTunes library has 706 albums, but only about 60% of my collection has been ripped.)), check the release date, and decide whether it beats out the current choice for that year.
I’ll be getting back to you on this, when I’ve found a couple of hours to crank through the data!

A quick check at the posting dates for the last few entries in my blog confirms that my blogging rate has fallen off recently. The interesting thing is that I’ve been contributing as much to the blogosphere as I usually do; it’s just that I’ve found myself contributing a lot of comments to other people’s blogs.
And this provoked the following thought. Presumably, people that visit my blog do so because they are interested in what I’m writing about – atheism, science, philosophy, software, aviation, music, the family, whatever. And most of my recent comments have been about these very subjects. I wonder if there’s an easy way to weave these threads together: to post a comment on, say, Secular Philosophy, and have the same material show up here, decorated with just enough contextual infirmation that you could decide whether you wanted to pop over to the story I had commented on and read the whole thread.
If we all used the same blogging software, I could imagine ways of implementing true “multiple inheritance” of blog content. Absent standards, this is likely to be a manual process for a while. (Or can Digg or Feedburner help out, perhaps?)