I’ve been tagged by the geekalicious Political Penguin to write about my cell in exactly 139-words.
So here goes…
Yeah, I use a BlackBerry.
I’m one of those people.
It’s only my second BlackBerry, I had the 8800, but my new Curve is much better.
No it’s not 3G, and that’s an issue on the move — but it does have a full keyboard, WiFi, video, 3.2MPxl camera, and launches and runs apps quickly.
Obviously a BlackBerry’s USP is its handling of email. This is truly peerless. And as I was using my Nokia N95’s 3G connection mainly for email, I don’t really miss the faster net access.
The thing that has impressed me most is the apps. The ÜberTwitter and facebook apps are awesome, and fully integrate with the BlackBerry’s brilliant OS. If Vodafone had the iPhone, I’d probably have that, but as a second choice, the 8900 has proven to be capable, well-designed, and powerful.
There. Pithy? I think so. I’ve utterly sold the phone short — but 139-words are the rules.
Lists, lists, lists. Everyone doing ‘em, so why not me? The 2007 list is here.
Best Record Kings of Leon - Only by the Night Well I can’t say I’ve been blown away by any one record this year, but Kings of Leon are making very good music. I actually think - shock, horror! - that there are some good pop records in the charts at the moment, too.
Best Film The Dark Knight Well it was the year of the comic book movie. We had Iron Man, Hulk, Hell Boy II and Wanted (and those are just the ones off the top of my head). I’d say that Dark Knight wins out with Iron Man a close second. I also enjoyed Burn After Reading.
Best TV Show The Wire - Series 5 The Wire is simply the best television programme ever made. Period.
Best Book
N/A I’ve read no new fiction this year. I spent most of my time reading old John le Carré books and Graham Greene. I’ll have to remedy this in ‘09.
Best Podcast This American Life This is probably the choice that has caused me to ponder most, as I listen to oodles of podcasts. But This American Life has provided the most memorable and beautiful moments. Subscribe, if you haven’t already. Worthy mentions to The Collings and Herrin Podcast [sic], Sarcastic Gamer and Football Weekly.
Best Radio Show Adam & Joe
Funny and creative. Brilliant, basically.
Best Video Game Gears of War 2 It’s been another cracking year for gaming. GTA4 was outstanding, Far Cry 2 was a surprisingly deep game, and Left 4 Dead (which I get for XMAS) looks great. Nothing quite topped GOW2 though. It’s awesome. The art style is incredible. The level design spectacular. And the weapons rock. Epic.
Best Gadget iPhone I haven’t got one. I can’t quite give up my BlackBerry (or switch to O2). However the app-store has made the iPhone a serious proposition. The utility of the device - theoretical and realised - is astonishing. I will get one, eventually.
Best App Fluid I have adored this app all year. I have run GMail and Google Reader constantly using Fluid and it has made life much easier. I’ve also been mega-impressed with Skitch.
Best Political Blog Chicken Yoghurt Justin has simply rocked this year. One of the best writers in the medium. Sadie’s Tavern would be a worthy mention too.
Best Non-political Blog Limmy This blog has made me - figuratively - piss myself all year.
Best Newspaper The Guardian It better watch its back. The Guardian has lost its way a little this year. It’s still the best paper, though.
Best sportsperson MS Dhoni Finally, someone’s made a team out of the Indians. They’ve always had the talent (although the current team is pretty darn hot).
Whatever is left of the government’s reputation for protecting data took another hit today as news broke that a memory stick, containing the usernames and passwords for a key government IT system, has been found in a pub carpark.
The Mail on Sunday said ministers had ordered the emergency shutdown of the Gateway website - which covers anything from tax returns to parking tickets - while experts checked to ensure people’s private details were not compromised.
The loss of the memory stick is another embarrassment for the government in a long series of data mishandling incidents which began with the loss of the entire child benefit database.
Members of the public can register on Gateway to access hundreds of government services including self-assessment tax returns, pension entitlements and child benefits.
The key reason the government proposed the National ID Card scheme in 2005, was to unify the major IT systems (forget counter-terrorism, that’s a red-herring and the cards would do little or nothing to help agents track suspected terrorists). This would mean that if a civil servant were to lose his/her logins, or - heavens forbid - goes rogue, all your data could be harvested.
It is widely rumoured that the retired General will offer his backing to Senator Obama on NBC talk show Meet The Press today. Cillizza points out that Powell’s support will shore up Obama’s foreign policy credentials - the one area where McCain still gets traction.
UPDATE ::
The Beltway rumour mill was right, Colin Powell today announced his endorsement of the Democrat presidential nominee Barack Obama.
As a former Army General and Secretary of State in the Bush administration, Powell’s support will be seen as important in bolstering Obama’s foreign policy proposals, which include a “phased withdrawal” from Iraq.
Powell used the endorsement, made on NBC’s Meet the Press, to stress his long friendship with Obama’s rival, John McCain, but added that his vice-presidential hopeful Sarah Palin, isn’t ready to be President of the United States.
UPDATE 2 ::
I’ve just listened to the audio from the Meet the Press interview, and Powell stressed the GOP’s lurch to the right as an important factor in his decision. Powell’s ‘defection’ may prove to be decisive in cementing the support of centre-right Republicans - the much-discussed ‘Obamacans’ - who feel alienated by the appointment of Palin and McCain’s reliance on divisive political tactics.
Powell rejected the culture-war that McCain has embraced.
Commentators also mentioned the importance of Powell as a retired veteran, with regard to the ageing populations of Florida. Many former members of the military live in the crucial state of Florida and would be considered natural McCain voters.
Home Secretary Jacqui Smith claims that “human trafficking, organised immigration crime, illegal working and benefit fraud” will be tackled by the cards.
Who could possibly argue with that?
Well me, for starters. Can someone point out to me an expensive and large-scale IT-based project that this government has actually carried out successfully? New Labour seems obsessed with proving that governments are incapable of rolling out such schemes. Even the ones they trumpet early on, such as Tax Credits, turn out to be a colossal mess in reality. They’re simply incompetent when it comes to organising large IT projects. And don’t even get me started on their commitment to data security. Jeeesh.
Now don’t get me wrong, Labour has many well-intentioned and smart people. They even have people who are relatively tech-savvy - Tom Watson for one. But the organisational and managerial skill required to deliver on these sorts of projects is non-existent. They bring in an army of costly consultants when one decent project manager would do. Nothing like this ever goes to plan unless it’s directed by someone with a clear idea of what they’re doing.
Then there’s the cost - which we know, regardless of countless promises to the contrary, will spiral and spiral out of control. Again, the consultants get involved and contractors, who won the job promising the world, start asking for more cash. Budgets, we’ve learned from bitter experience, are meaningless in large-scale IT projects.
Last, but certainly not least, we have this government’s proclivity to lean on our civil liberties. An ID Card scheme will increase the ability of the government to control us. And as we saw with the terrorism laws, the authorities have a track in abusing new powers.
Of course Labour, being the conniving ratbags they are, have said that the cards will be rolled out to non-EU students and people with marriage visas, but this just a way to shore up the support of the authoritarian right. ID Cards, in reality, will do little to address the problems the Home Secretary outlines, as I explained in November ‘06 ::
The argument for ID cards is however, almost utterly without substance. Our already porous boarders would not be plugged by documentation. Only manpower can do that.
I know the EU is probably leaning on Number 10 to push ahead with cards (ID Cards have been commonplace in Europe for years - but then so have communists), but the whole thing is destined to be yet another embarrassing debacle for this government.
That they can’t even launch a blog without being taken for £100k, being sold a rehashed open-source template, breaking the terms of its creator, and then getting caught out by pesky Tory bloggers.
I’m getting things sorted for Tallinn and toying with a few things. Last weekend I took an intensive TEFL course, which may open a few opportunities over in Estonia to teach English. Indeed I’m thinking - in the long term - of maybe opening a small language school of my own. Not sure; but you know me, if there is the slightest chance of a business opportunity…
I also have some fiction I want to develop, for a book or a screenplay. I have bought the excellent Scrivener, which is looking to be a treat and a great writing solution.
I’m going to continue to write my travel and politics entries here, but I may cross post relevant ones over at Rational Geekery. I actually expect RatGeek to be busier than tygerland as I get stuck into some tech stuff. This will remain my “personal” blog… for now.
BTW. I’m getting on wonderfully with my MacBook Pro.
In preparation for my move to Tallinn, I have bought a new MacBook Pro! :o)
Specs: -
Apple Macintosh MacBook Pro
OSX 10.5.2 “Leopard”
2.5 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
4 GB DDR2 RAM
NVIDIA GeForce 6800M GT 512MB VRAM
It’s thinner than Olga’s PowerBook and so much faster. One of the main factors was the fact that my ageing iBook had become painfully slow and no use whatsoever for photography. As Olga will be in the UK most of time, another key feature was the built in “eyesight” cam for Skype use. Just got to get used to the keyboard.
I’d also like to mention John at KRCS in Nottingham, who was excellent and did me a *brilliant* deal. Seriously, if you’re in the market for a new Mac, KRCS should be your absolute first port of call. Thanks John.
Anyway, upon excitedly unwrapping my dongle I found that even though the instructions were idiot-proof and all the software was auto-installed from the device itself, I couldn’t connect from my iBook.
I tried several things, including downloading and installing different drivers and playing with the settings. Yet nothing, I repeat NOTHING, would bloody work. As usual, when technology fails me (or I fail it), I may have used a fair bit of blue language and banged the desk a couple of times. We all have our faults, get over it.
Blockbuster wants to take on the might of Apple, Microsoft, netflicks and the cable companies, who stream (and download) content directly to their customers’ homes. And it plans to do this by buying an outdated electronics retailer. Hmmm.
I’m not going to replace any new Mac for several cycles, so my best return on my investment, would be to wait until the platform makes a significant jump (trusting I can be confident of the new technology’s stability).
The Guardian, understanding the limitations of dead-tree media, is diversifying beyond even its successful online news and comment portal model. The Guardian sees itself as a “platform” that will work alongside start-ups, offering support and sharing its resources. It’s unclear whether the new business will provide funding for projects outside of its immediate umbrella. More...
On Valentines Day, again, a US university was rocked when one of its own students entered a lecture theatre and shot at classmates with a shotgun.
Five students were killed, and sixteen wounded before the gunman turned his weapon on himself. As usual the 24hr rolling news channels descended on the university campus and the salivating media circus had begun. Thrashing around for hard facts, and finding little, the networks - desperate to hold onto viewers - resorted to type: calling on their army of commentators and “experts” to offer opinions and suspicions based on… well fuck all really.
Of all the vultures who profit from this sort of tragedy, the most infamous is one Jack Thompson: a Fox News talking head, who happens to be an attorney (who isn’t?) specialising in jumped-up cases based on his own fucked-up Christian Conservative moral compass.
According to Wikipedia, Mr. Thompson has wasted a variety of people’s time, chasing targets such as rappers, shock-jocks, and more recently video-game companies. And it’s this latter obsession that led to Thompson’s smug face appearing on Fox News last month. Within hours of the killings, and even before the police had released any information, we find Thompson breaking his neck to blame video games. It’s really quite phenomenal: the speed at which he twists events to justify his agenda.
After an initial intro from the Fox presenter, Thompson begins with: “yeah, I wish I weren’t here”.
Yeah whatever. From someone who’s made a name for himself profiting from such tragedies, this sounds somewhat hollow. He’s a Fox News ‘Go-To-Guy’, after all. Some kid goes postal on campus, shooting up his classmates, and the right-wing news agencies know the man to call: Jack “it’s the video games” Thompson. Indeed, in his next breath Thompson squares the blame directly at video-games, even though, at that point, we have no-idea whether the 27-year old perpetrator was a gamer or not. Back to Jack: -
“Well we find from brain scans studies out of Harvard, that if you get started playing, for example violent video games, you can, errrr, are more likely to copycat the behaviours in the games and the disturbing thing, that keeps popping up in many of these, as in Virginia Tech, Columbine, Paducah where I represented the six parents of the three girls shot and killed is that you can rehearse these type of massacres on simulators, which are called video-games, and you can, errrr, are therefore make more proficient in doing this….”
Now, for a minute, if we could excuse the junior-school level grammar on show, let’s have a look at some of the accusations Thompson aims at video games.
First: video-games are killing simulators. Well, I guess, in a way they are. But having a joypad in your hands is a world away from holding a shotgun for real. If all you’ve done is play Call of Duty, I doubt you’d know where to start firing a shotgun. If sitting on your arse playing Halo can can prepare you for a life of killing, why doesn’t my pissy attempts at Wii Golf improve my handicap out on the course?
Second: Video gamers are more likely to copycat behaviours in the game. Well, doh. It would be hard to copycat something if you’ve never played it. But, lets not be pedantic, we know what Thompson is getting at. He’s suggesting that video gamers are more likely to kill, and so, logically: video games cause massacres. Ahhh. And this is the rub: Thompson has tried several times to sue video game producers, hardware manufacturers, and retailers for hundreds of millions of dollars. As the sayings goes: follow the money.
It should come as no surprise, when millions of kids are playing video games, that if a morbid fascination with guns and murder is your bag, you’re more likely to be attracted to games where the plot centres on guns and murder. Much like, if grooming horses is you thing, you may find yourself playing a Nintendo DS game where you… wait for it… groom horses with a plastic stylus. That kids with violent tendencies are inclined to play such games such as Grand Theft Auto, is a no-brainer.
I play games such as Halo, Call of Duty, Counter-Strike, and Half-Life. Online and in single-player mode. Yet, funnily enough, I’ve never once taken it on myself to right a few wrongs armed with a high-powered rifle. It’s just not in my make-up, but competing against players across the world - just to prove how awesome I am, is absolutely my motivation. Video games don’t create psychos - society, chemicals, and fucked-up genes create psychos. Video games merely provide people with a cathartic escape, often one in which reflects reality - be it street crime or senseless wars in the Middle East.
I wonder, wouldn’t Mr. Thompson be better employed crusading against the proliferation of firearms in America? After all, isn’t the easy access to rifles, hand guns, and shotguns, far more important to a prospective high-school shooter than any sofa-based practice with a plastic controller? I wonder why America’s gun laws haven’t been the target of Jack’s vitriol?
Now I’m not going to argue for greater gun control. But then, neither am I going to use the law to coerce others to live by my moral agenda in any other field either.
Blaming video games for high-school violence is a great way to mitigate an incident’s impact on America’s gun laws. So is it any wonder that conservatives rally behind a pompous wanker happy to blame all societies ills on something other than freely available weaponry. You see, it’s got little to do with video games, and everything to do with that most hallowed of conservative institutions: the National Rifle Association. Oh, and in Jack Thompson’s case: money and ego, too.
It turns out that last week’s shooter did indeed occasionally play Counter-Strike: a popular multi-player online video-game. His friends said that this was ordinary - most of them played it. You see, this is what people do… they play video games. But it also transpires that he was a clinical depressive and had recently stopped taking his proscribed medication. His mother had recently died and his father was in a home. The guy was, as they say, pretty fucked up.
But Jack “it’s the video games” Thompson isn’t going to let a man’s dire situation, and ultimate breakdown, stop him from blaming video games. Indeed Thompson has attempted to use the law after several other shootings, to ascertain whether or not the perpetrator was a gamer. The courts have usually refused, citing that the evidence is crucial to an ongoing investigation. Thompson has claimed that “In every school shooting, we find that kids who pull the trigger are video gamers.” Right, so it’s got nothing to do with personal circumstance or free access to guns? Give me a break.
Let’s get one thing straight. Video games should have age restrictions enforced by law - a la DVDs and alcohol. But they shouldn’t be used as a tool to mitigate the greater problems facing a society where kids are taking firearms into class and killing and maiming their fellow students. It doesn’t wash, it’s manipulative, and it’s weak.
Self-interested charlatans such as Jack Thompson have no place passing comment on serious incidents, and the media, however desperate, should start acting with some semblance of responsibility.
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