Bloody Skype

I’m in the throes of trying to change my Skype password, having locked my account out with an incorrect cached password on a laptop which I hadn’t used for a while. So I go to the Skype website, punch in my details, and ask for a password reset. OK, says the site - wait for a token to arrive in your email, then follow the instructions.

So I wait. And wait. And wait some more. Then I go to bed.

In the wee small hours of the morning, the token arrives. So when I wake up , the first thing I do is click the link to reset the password. Except that I can’t because the bloody token’s expired…

Killer wifi routers eating babies

This is really funny, and pretty much sums up the appalling Panorama “documentary” on wifi last week. Which was the one time I’ve ever felt mad enough to follow through with a complaint, and it’s not like I don’t ever watch politicians lying on Newsnight…

Pretty (but) terrifying

Via John Naughton’s Memex 1.1, this is one of the most amazing pieces of visualisation I’ve seen in ages. It’s flight path data from the FAA plotted in various different ways against a background of the United States, showing the patterns that get created by the mass of aircraft as they fly over the US.

And while it’s absolutely hypnotic to watch, it’s also quite frankly terrifying. Because each of the 15,000 or so dots represents an airliner, burning fossil fuels and spewing mega-tonnes of carbon into the planetary ecosystem - so it’s a graphical representation of why as a species we’re pretty much doomed.

But at least our eventual demise is pretty to watch…

The human cost of guerilla marketing

Thursday is National Escargot Day, apparently - I know this because along with everyone else on the Manchester Airport train this morning, I was greeted by a snail as I boarded.

(Which was actually a marketing droid dressed in a snail costume, complete with shell and feelers, handing out flyers for Cafe Rouge.)

Morning isn’t the best time of the day for your average commuter, and it certainly wasn’t for the snail - from the expression on his face you’d have thought that he was going to share the same fate as the escargots he was attempting to promote. And given the congestion that he and his shell were causing as we all attempted to squeeze ourselves past the promotion, there was every chance that he would end the morning in garlic butter…

Ministers 2.0

You know that a technology has hit mainstream when the politicians start namedropping it in their speeches:

The argument is simple. We need the distribution of power to match the dispersal of information. We need the coordination of action to match the nature of interdependence. And in both tasks the social, economic and technological relationships that mark the world of Web 2.0 need to be exported to the political realm.

The pretender-to-the-throne-who-wasn’t, David Millband, speaks to a Google conference.

There’s some sentiments in there that are difficult to disagree with, but unfortunately his voting record is at odds with a lot of the speech: for ID cards, for control orders, for detention without trial, for Iraq and so on.

An alternative to lorem ipsum

I’ve got the Lorum Ipsum generator bookmarked as a quick way of creating nonsense content , but this makes an entertaining change from cod Latin:

The Post-Modernism generator

With the bonus that you actually have to read it quite closely to realise that it’s bullshit…

A cracking explanation of Enterprise 2.0

(And a further demonstration of how Slideshare rocks…)

The “Be Very Afraid” tour

Eben Moglen, who knows a thing or two about this:

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

Aren’t numbers fascinating?