Burning Lemons

A few minutes ago Barack Obama (The Democratic Presumptive candidate for President, for those of you who have been living under a rock for the past year) finished the keynote speech of his European tour in Berlin.

His speech has evoked the most positive reaction for a US politician since at least Bill Clinton and possibly JFK. Pro-American feeling hasn’t been so high since the days following 9/11.

So what does Obama offer that McCain doesn’t, well the message of change has gone down particularly well amongst the ranks of “Anyone but Bush” people in Europe he seems to offer a fresh take on US foreign policy after what they see as the particularly gung-ho tactics employed by George W Bush.

That said however Obama still doesn’t go as far as many people would like, his policy for Iraq withdrawal is not fast enough for some and others don’t like his focus upon Afghanistan.

I will write more on this in the coming day’s as Obama continues his European tour with further stops in Paris and London.]

Went to see Hancock earlier today, while I enjoyed it a lot I got the feeling that there was about two thirds of a great action/adventure movie in there and the other third (the last bit) really let the rest of the movie down.

Without wanting to give too much of the plot a way put it simply at the beginning of the film Hancock is an alcoholic, unpopular superhero living in LA. The film spends the first 20 minutes cleverly setting up this plot element which is fairly interesting and original even if it was all done before in The Increadibles.

Then following some help from a wannabe PR man and a short stint in prison Hancock has his image reformed becoming a popular hero.

Then (and sadly this is where I have to stop giving away details). It all falls apart, following the introduction of another superhero the movie turns from potentially new and exciting material into the same old superhero fare that we’ve seen dozens of times before.

A good concept badly executed

6/10

One of my Twitterfriends Tales recently wrote a great blog post on What Happened to Twitter so I’ve decided to chuck in my two cents as well. The fall of Twitter has been one of the great internet debate topics over the last month or two, of course the technical problems of Twitter go way back to its first explosion in popularity in round about early 2007 when web celebrities such as Leo Laporte began to use the service.

Unfortunately the nature of a service such as Twitter where messages are recieved by a central server, archived and then pushed out to a bunch of “followers” does not lend itself to scaling. Every time Digg founder Kevin Rose Twitters the message has to be pushed out to over 48,000 people, a number which is growing on a daily basis. Twitter has also to an extent complicaed this by also pushing out messages over SMS a potentially huge undertaking. If just 1,000 of Kevin’s followers want to see his Twitter then 1,000 messages have to be sent (at Twitter’s expense) to mobiles all over the world.

The real strain has been seen since about May this year when after multiple downtime issues the IM service was withdrawn in an attempt to improve the stability of the service with a promise to return the service “as soon as possible”. Three months on the service has yet to return and little progress appears to have been made in improving the stability of the service. Important services such as being able to see posts beyond the most recent 20 and being able to view replies were also unavailable for days at a time

However up until the end of June little progress appeared to have been made in finding a successor to Twitter, Kevin Rose’s own Pownce didn’t seem to be going anywhere and the most obvious Twitter-competitor Jaiku had been bought by Google and essentially shut down with no new members being allowed to join. The someone (Leo Laporte) discovered Plurk, twittered about it and suddenly we seemed to have our knight in shining armour. As Plurk’s own blog post shows the levels of traffic exploded overnight.

But contrary to the expectations of many people liked what they saw and didn’t just migrate back to Twitter after the weekend was over. While an obvious Twitter clone plurk does have enough features to distinguish it from Twitter such as the horizontal timeline and buit in replies.

So is this the end of Twitter? The orgenisation behind Twitter just recieved $15 Million in venture funding and says it plans to spend the money to shore up the service. But unless there are any big changes over the next few weeks and months I would have to say that it is pretty much over for Twitter, before now it may have been possible for Twitter to stave off its death. But now many of its most loyal users are jumping ship the oppertunity seems to be slipping from Twitter’s grasp

The laptop I’m typing this on was sold to me as being 2.75cm thick. The milk I poured on my cereal this morning came out a 1 pint bottle. I’m going to get in a car later and travel at 70mph. Tomorrow I will go to a school that 4 years ago taught me to measure in square metres, kilos and litres.

Britain appears to be the only country that still uses two systems of measurement. We still use the imperial system for some things (cartons of milk) and metric for other things (cartons of juice). The metric switchover began 40 years ago and is still not complete. To give you an idea how long this has been going on my mum (now 48) was taught using the metric system, but still we have failed to finish switching over.

Many people in Britain point to the case of a grocer who was (I think) sent to jail 5 years ago for refusing to sell his goods in metric weights as a sign of the country going mad. This however was not a sign of legislation having a problem. The man good sell his goods in pounds as much as he liked. He just had to offer measurment in a metric alternative as well.

So why don’t we change? Well most governments see the change as something that would lose them vital votes without making a huge difference in the position of society so no-one, especially now fells the need to make the change.

But while I believe that the change would not be instantly popular I think that it will in the long term make the functioning of the country far smoother and easier

Last night I got back from a trip to France. During the long time spent in various airports and on planes I got thinking about the remarkable changes that have occurred in European air travel over the last 15 years. Before about 1995 if you wanted to fly from here in Scotland to a regional airport in lets say France or Germany (totally hypothetically I’ll say Glasgow-Perpignan) you would have been handing over the better part of about £500 and would have to take at least 3 flights, and woe betide you if you didn’t plan to spend a Saturday night in your destination, if you didn’t that could be up to another £1000 poured straight into the pockets of your chosen national carrier.

Competition did exist of course (well from around the 1970s onwards) but this was mainly in the form of charter airlines flying from regional airports to sunshine spots in Spain, Portugal and Greece. The flights were infrequent, unreliable and still not particularly cheap.

Enter Ryanair and easyJet, arguments rage to this day over who was the first true no-frills airline, easyJet’s first flight was in November 1995 and Ryanair born out of a full-service Irish regional airline started it’s slow, gradual transformation to its current low-cost model in the early 1990s. What is certain though is the bang that they made. Although the change was slow at first expansion was rapid for the two airlines. Validation for the sector came shortly afterwards when British Airways launched its own no-frills airline in the form of Go (later swallowed by easyJet).

What the revolution has done is placed previously small unheard of places on the map. Ryanair in particular with its policy of flying from smaller regional airports (and then lying about their location) has caused explosive growth for certain parts of Europe. Hahn, 70 miles from Frankfurt in The Rhineland-Pfaltz region of Germany went from being a closed US Air Force base to a low-cost hub with 40 flights every day to destination across Europe in just 10 years. Ryanair has proved that it is economically possible to make money flying about 150 people a day from the Western German countryside to The North of Spain.

And so we come to my flight (see how I did that?). I paid £30 to fly around 1200 miles on two flights, while I give that many fares are much higher I have got fares like this time and again and I thin that whatever you may make of Ryanair you must admit the contribution it has made to growth in Europe and regeneration of deprived areas over the last 10 years.

A terrible thing happened today, This Week in Tech one of my personal favourite podcasts was cancelled, even wore news: it’s not on next week either. Podcasts are wonderful things especially for someone like me who spends an hour a day travelling. If you have a long flight lined up downloading a couple can really help make the time fly. Another personal favourite of mine is CNET’s Buzz Out Loud which takes a daily look at technology. What makes it so great is the hosts. Tom, Molly and Jason’s personality including the infamous Mollyrant make the podcast so much more than a daily news round up and makes you feel like you are there talking with them (which indeed you can be at 17:00 GMT daily at www.watchbol.com . You can find all the information about various podcasts Below

Buzz Out Loud - bol.cnet.com

TWiT - This Week in Tech - twit.tv

MacBreak Weekly - twit.tv/mbw

 Amateur Traveller - amateurtraveller.com

Mark Kermode’s Film reviews - bbc.co.uk/fivelive/entertainment/kermode.shtml

Enjoy

When a close friend once told me that it was his intention to join the army I was genuinely taken aback. While I have the greatest respect for people willing to put themselves in the line of fire I see absolutely no reason to put myself (and by extension people I care about) In front of the open end of a gun with someone willing to kill me clutching the trigger.

So it was with mixed feelings that I read the news that  Prince Harry has been serving in Afghanistan for the past 10 weeks.While I have few feelings for the Royal Family I did have to congratulate the young prince for doing it and yet at the same time I questioned why he had been sent there at all. Harry with the gratest will in the world is not the best person to have serving next to you. While I’m amazed that the news blackout at this end lasted so long I find it impossible to believe that no rumours were circulating in the vicinity of the area he was deployed in. This begs the question was this a stupid risk? After all Prince Harry was pulled from an Iraq deployment for this very reason.

After considering this I believe that the decisions taken were poor. Not those made by Harry himself but those made by the people sending him there. The reporting of his presence has brought renewed attention to the troops in The Region and has arguably set back the campaign against The Taliban. While Harry cannot be thrown out of the army for this kind of reason the decision should have been made to keep him away from the frontline.

My apologies for the lack of action here lately. It’s been a bad time for exams and a couple of posts I’d written have mysteriously disappeared. Hopefully we’ll be back up and running ASAP. At least by late March.

In the meantime I’d like to recommend Sticks and Stones blog http://www.sticksandstonesblog.com for great blogging.

Off to the cinema this weekend with a selection of friends and suddenly unsure what to see. All this year there have been a collection of astoundingly mediocre movies rolling off the Hollywood conveyor belt and suddenly 3 great films come along at once. So will it be Juno, No Country for Old Men or There Will be Blood. I’m not sure as there will be under 12s with me (though they can pass for 12 easily) Juno sounds the safest bet but it is unlikely that he would find a movie about someone being pregnant and giving a baby up for adoption particularly interesting. Any suggestions in the comments please! 

Well we’re now just under 30 minutes away from the first results in the super Tuesday poll in Georgia. The latest I’ve heard is that the race for the Dem nomination is way too tight to call, thankfully Barek Obama is managing to pull slightly closer to Hillary Clinton. On the GOP side John McCain could well seal it up tonight. The most important thing to remember here is that the polls can go very wrong. In the NH primary Barek Obama was forecast to win by 10-15% and Clinton ended up taking the race with a 3-5% margin. I’ll have more later but if you’re looking for coverage I wholeheartedly endorse (groan) Al Jazeera English: if you don’t get it on TV (in the UK it’s on Sky 514) watch it online at http://Jalipo.com