Given that the bloke seems to have been broadcasting for the last 150 years, you can’t begrude Alastair Cooke his retirement. I can’t say I was ever anything other than a very occasional listener, but Letter From America seems to fall very definitely into the “comfort food” school of radio programming. It’s probably something to do with the fact that I only ever seemed to come across it late at night, but the slow and measured delivery was a bit like having a bedtime story read to you by an aged uncle. Perfect for parody, but there must have been something in it to keep it on the air for 150 years.
Archive for 2 March 2004
Peter Cochrane used to be the Chief Futurologies (or some such title) for BT – which always brought to mind someone in a white coat and a very high forehead telling us how we’d all be travelling in rocket-powered hovercars! While wearing tinfoil tracksuits!! And eating blue-green algae!!! If the robots haven’t united to enslave us in a thousand year tyranny!!!!
Actually, he’s not quite like that – I heard him speak a few years ago, and he actually looks and sounds like someone who did his PhD on telecommunications transmission networks. Which of course he did. These days he’s the co-founder of Concept Labs, which appears to be some kind of venture capital fund, and writes a column for Silicom.com.
It’s quite often worth reading, if only for the postscript, where he brings us up to date with how and where he wrote the column. It’s usually something along the lines of “original idea conceived while boarding BA229 LHR to IAD, typed up on a PocketSized HokeyCokey2000 between pre-takeoff drinks and the dessert course, uploaded via the Intellesat MegaBird, edited by my secretary back on the ground, resent via 1.5Gbps undersea fibreoptic link to my hotel in Madagascar, and finally emailed to Silicon from a lousyshittycrappy 9k6 dialup link from the Travel Lodge Northampton goddammit whyistheinfrastructureinthiscountrysopoor i’veonlyjustmanagedtoconnecttothenet withtheaidofcrocodileclips”
Ok, I exaggerate slightly, but only for comic effect.
His column this week makes some interesting points about how increasing storage density means that it’s realistic to expect terabytes of storage in a pocket, and what that is going to do to the music business. Which is probably advice that is going to fall on deaf ears, given that the pigopolists haven’t managed to come to terms with the internet yet.
So to really try and break things, here we go again…
To see if this works any better than Sharp MT…
Although in general I’m really impressed with Openoffice, I being driven to distraction last night by Writer going ‘beep’ every time I scrolled past the junction of pages 4 and 5, or typing anything at the bottom of page 4. I tried everything I could think of, and then ended up posting a question on the Openoffice forums.
End result is that it appears to be something to do with a table breaking over a page, and Writer being ever-so-helpful and beeping to let me know. Personally, I’d rather it didn’t just beep – an error message would have been much more helpful – but sorting out the tables seems to have sorted the problem. So I’m friends with it again.
