Uncategorized

I've been away for a while. A holiday, if you will.

Some of us don't have the luxury of being able to escape work entirely, but avoiding the computer as much as possible is a start. It will come as no surprise, then, that I've been using the iPad a lot. Even my iPhone has been left in the safe.

Now there's a great deal that the iPad can't do. I haven't exactly done a great deal of work on it. But for reading, both books and websites, and email it's fantastic. That's ...

It's a reasonable expectation that PCs aren't going to change a great deal. It's likely that they'll continue to get incrementally better, but without evolving into something revolutionary themselves.

At the same time, an increasing number of PC functions are being farmed out to dedicated devices. Convergence is no longer the buzzword in PC land - divergence has well and truly taken over as we realise that specialised hardware is much better at doing certain tasks than a beige box ...

I feel remote.

I feel like I'm working on a rig tens of miles from the coast.

In reality, I'm five minutes from the centre of a city. No village. No town. An actual city.

Here's a little ping to googe.com to show you what I'm contending with:
99 packets transmitted, 95 packets received, 4.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/stddev = 570.649/817.659/1797.023/213.687 ms

Yes, you read that right, the fastest ping is 570ms, ...

Something remarkable is happening.

In the face of overwhelming competition from Google's Android and RIM's Blackberry high-end smartphones Apple's iPhone 4 should not be a runaway success. But, with over 600,000 pre-orders filled on the first day, it already is.

This is not a bad thing.

For Apple's iPhone, the mobile phone that took an extremely tired and uncompetitive industry and turned it on its head, to fall slowly into obscurity so soon would be ...

Nothing represents life better than the to-me-to-you struggle of the Chuckle Brothers. The amount of time I spend in conversations where neither party understands what the other is saying probably far outweighs those where both party comes away feeling like they've accomplished something productive. Perhaps my readers suffer the same dilemma... a thought I'll not dwell on.

Perhaps clarity comes naturally to some of us. I'd like to think that clarity comes better to my writing than ...