Enrico Salad - back in business
You can see from the sequence of posts on this site that I (by my nature) am not a natural blogger. I don't seem to have the time, or often the inclination, to ramble on about stuff on the internet for two or three people a month to read.
Then why this post, I hear you cry.... well, I discovered today some very cool features of the Google Picasa tool, namely the ability to creat all sorts of cool flash slideshows. You can see one of them if you click the "Retrosqueeze Prototype" link on the right hand side of this page.
There are some pretty good tools out there for free now to enable some pretty fancy sites to be created in not very much time. It's a wonder, then, that there is still so much dross on the interweb......
Is more TV choice good for us?
Many, many commentators have been banging on for ages that TV is being "dumbed-down", even more so now that we have 100s of channels to chose from. It is obviously not reasonable to expect that all these channels can produce hour after hour of quality programming, nor do we expect to have every channel continuously re-running the "classics". But what do we get instead? Usually lots of cheap-to-produce reality pap, such as "How Clean is Your House", "10 Years Younger" or "You Are What you Eat". It seems like most of the time with these shows the participants involved could do with going on all the programmes at once.
However, I have to say I enjoy watching these programmes in a morbid kind of way. It helps to make most of us feel a bit better about oursleves and in some way contributes to the public service ethic of TV that we used to get all the time in days or yore (yes people, you will get fat and die of a heart attack if you eat takeaways everyday and stuff your face with cream cakes all the time).
I myself welcome the reality pap which exposes to eveyone what a state we have got oursleves into, and hopefully it will spur a few people on to change their lives for the better.
Anyway, I have to cut this post short now, as "It's me or the dog" is about to start (haven't seen this one before) followed by "Supernanny". I need to be ready to shout condescendingly at the TV and nod sagely when the bleedingly-obvious advice is dished out......
Google Everything?
Google Talk launched today - I duly downloaded the client and logged-in with my gmail details. The first thing that struck me were the words "They say talk is cheap. Google thinks it should be free..." on the download page - telcos beware, Google is out to get you.
The user experience, I have to say, I was immediately drawn to. The presentation was simple and clear (it looks very Apple-esq, which is not a bad thing), and it did a few things, BUT IT DID THEM WELL! At the moment it is fairly simplistic, functionality wise, i.e. no Webcams, no picture sharing etc. but this will probably come with time.
What Google appear to be doing, is to build up a user base who have access to the best quality tools available all linked into gmail. Where will the value come from for Google? Well on top of the advertising potential, I think that they will branch out into Payment Services (like Paypal) and possibly even have a go at becoming the "trusted entitiy" for the web (like MSN tried to do with Passport). It would not suprise me if in eighteen months' time we will be siging in to low-security (i.e. not Banking just yet) websites with our Google details.
Google are quite clearly trying to build an "operating system" for the Web, and are quite clearly the leading innovators out there at the moment. They are on the crest of a wave. It will be interesting to see as they get bigger and bigger whether the same user concerns will start to emerge that people currently have with Microsoft.
Travel Thoughts
This week I am in Canada at a meeting discusing various things about the future of mobile services. I don't know about you, but I am a paranoid traveller. I have to cintinually check and re-check that I have my tickets/passport/keys etc. before I set out, during the journey to the airport, even when I am waiting in departures. I don't know why I do this, perhaps the fear that if I didn't do it then all my stuff might just magically disappear. It drives my wife crazy.
Landing at Montreal airport was a very pleasant suprise, and proves to me that with the correct amount of planning it is perfectly possible to build a well designed airport (take note BAA). The place is large and airy, clean and (get this) there is an efficient and well-manned immigration room! No waiting for ages in a vast snaking queue, instead an efficient distrbution of all the people to a large number of immigration officials, a couple of routine (if pointless) questions and off you go.
The baggage turned up quickly too.
Then literally five paces outside the airport was a coach waiting to ferry the businessmen and tourists to the major hotels and places of interest in the city (and all for a reasonable price). None of this madness, and expense, you get at Heathrow.
It is somewhat embarrasing to see such good design and organisation, and then to compare it to our flagship airport which hasn't really been designed as such, just splatted down to the west of London. And if was only the airports that were wrong with our transport system then I wouldn't mind as much.....
Teaching Your Mum to IM
After they had many, many problems with dial-up (probably as the PC had been infected with the sasser worm) I finally managed to convince the olds to go broadband. It was a tough job, mainly as they did not use the internet much anyway. The normal procedure to find something out from a website would be to call their #1 son (i.e. little old me) and usually my dad would ask me to "hack-in to the old internet and find such-and-such out for me". Well, I soon tired of this and went about chipping away until they caved in and embraced the 21st century. I can confidently tell you that it is possible to install broadband by phone, but it requires a full bucket-and-a-half of patience.
Stage two was to introduce IM. It was gratifying to note that after only one hour of coaching that even my mother could IM with the best of them, including using the webcam. Imagine my surprise when I came home last week, turned on the computer (or "hacked-to to the old WLAN") and suddenly a message appeared from my mother "chatting" to me as if we were a couple of punk teenagers. I was aghast, even agog. It turns out that, without any coaching, mother keeps the PC on with the speakers turned up very loud so that she can tell immediately when someone from the family is online. Family communications have gone up ten-fold. Instead of the normal weekly phone-call, we communicate much more regularly. I would never have thought it possible, but (if you pardon the expression) you can teach an old dog new tricks.
I am now planning to scare them with Skype by making their PC "ring"....
