Posts by Andrew E
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I was just starting a secondment to the UK government. Web access was notoriously slow in the (then) Home Office building, but it simply dried up by around lunchtime on that day. One of my new colleagues had a mate who worked in the ministry's emergency response coordination centre, one of the few places in the building outside the Ministers' offices that had a TV. He took me down there to watch the live broadcasts and we arrived just before the second tower was hit. Naturally, the place was a bit twitchy, in case there might be attacks on similar London targets, including 1 Canada Square in Canary Wharf. So we got out of the way and spent the rest of the day reflecting along similar lines to that suggested by Barlow. Given that the UK Parliament had passed the Prevention of Terrorism Act as a 'temporary' measure in 1974 and it had remained in place since then, it wasn't unreasonable to suppose that we'd be seeing other measures antithetical to civil liberties in the wake of this much larger event.
On a more mundane level, it was quite eerie to think that I'd been up in the tourist viewing gallery of the WTC tower almost a year to the day previously.
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Hard News: Steve, 1999, in reply to Lucy Stewart,
That meme has been going around for a while now. It sounds attractive, but it's not actually true
I'll take your word for it. I use a different method myself.
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Hard News: Steve, 1999, in reply to Kumara Republic,
Smartphones still can't play MMOs or edit videos yet. It's probably only a matter of time though
You can edit a video on your iPhone. Don't know about other phones though.
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And my (recently deceased after 8 years of sterling service) Sony Ericsson P800 - with touch interface and Opera browser - was apparently much admired by Jobs back in 2003.
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Hard News: Steve, 1999, in reply to Geoff Lealand,
The best joke at the Edinburgh festival this year; "I had to choose a password with 8 characters, so I chose Snow White & The Seven Dwarfs".
According to XKCD, you wouldn't be far off the pace if you did choose that as your password.
There's some nice quotes from Jobs on the WSJ. One that rings a bell for me, who was starting work (and then going to Uni) on the cusp of the DOS/GUI change was this:
“Some people are saying that we ought to put an IBM PC on every desk in America to improve productivity. It won’t work. The special incantations you have to learn this time are the “slash q-zs” and things like that. The manual for WordStar, the most popular word-processing program, is 400 pages thick. To write a novel, you have to read a novel––one that reads like a mystery to most people. They’re not going to learn slash q-z any more than they’re going to learn Morse code. That is what Macintosh is all about.” [Playboy, Feb. 1, 1985]
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Speaker: Bad Aid: How Murray McCully is…, in reply to Terence Wood,
It seems to me Terence that your last post is a good draft of a counterblast to McCully's op-ed. I think you should phone the Dom Post op-ed editor and offer them an article.
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Speaker: Bad Aid: How Murray McCully is…, in reply to Sacha,
Indeed. It's what underpinned Mrs Thatcher's attitude to the UK Civil Service, and is the political ideology behind the Yes, Minister series.
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Speaker: Bad Aid: How Murray McCully is…, in reply to martinb,
It seems to me that this is an essential element of the media - to provide witness that what has been done has not gone un-noticed.
However, to misquote a certain political theorist, the point is not only to bear witness to the things going wrong in the world, but to change them.
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Speaker: Bad Aid: How Murray McCully is…, in reply to Fionnaigh McKenzie,
Yeah, thanks Andrew, I’m just feeling pessimistic about how many people are going to do that...
So am I. But that pessimism needs to be converted into anger about the present state of affairs, and the will to encourage others to vote for (at least) a less-worse option. As Mr Lydon sang a while back, anger is an energy.
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Put your 'x' in the right place in November?