furtherandfaster

Wii gets Iplayer

The Iplayer has been one of the success stories of 2008. If you can't be bothered to programme a VCR then just head over to the BBC website and you can download programmes within 7 days and you then have up to 28 days to watch them - a neat trick to stop you tape loads of programme and never getting around to watching them. We download Dr Who pretty regularly in this household and I have used it to watch things I never would have bothered to watch in the programming stream - Goldfrapp and a fantastic narrowcast on the history of the harp.

Iplayer is a killer app for the BBC and could prove to be the same for the Wii. Xbox and Playstation seem firmly stuck in gaming territory - profitable but not mass market.  Iplayer offers Wii a ticket to the big time. No ads either. Damm

OK computer

2007 has been an awful year in my household for computers. We have reformatted 3. And spent countless hours sorting out software and getting the different bits of the network to talk to each other.  I've gone onto an exchange server which means that there is always a copy of my contacts, emails and calendar sitting somewhere in the midwest of the USA in case something happens to the computer at home. This had to be updated to Outlook 2007 and this required an entire upload myself. The only consolation is that now it is done it shouldn't need repeating for a couple of years and my (new) mobile phone collects all the same data of wifi everytime I switch it on. So I have a single dataset.  I SOO hope that we get to 2008 on an even keel with no more IT gremlins viruses and all the paraphernalia. One reason I love the film Dark Star is that it was made at the same time as the first Star Wars film and addresses the realities of nothing working properly on a spaceship. Luke Skywalker never had to contend with spam and viruses.

Audition 3.0 arrived and installed

Forgive a little technical rave but I just upgraded to the latest version of Audition the audio editing package from Adobe - for about £70. Bargain. For me the last couple of years has been a bit of a struggle for audio editing - I've had to resort to using 20 quid software which is actually fine but not that user friendly. Audition is the equivalent of getting into a Lamborgini - you can edit, fx, and mix to your hearts content - you can even master into surround sound - most of it I will never use. What I am looking forward to getting my hands on are the new editing tools taken from Photoshop - the marquee, the lassoo and the spot healing brush which enable you to literally paint out bits of the sound spectrum you don't like. Which when you're editing quotes from research groups is just unbelievable - we haven't had anything like this before. Spot the mobile phonem the air con unit the coughs and wipe them from the entire session (or turn that part of the EQ band down).  Of course it is also a doddle to fool around with old recordings and clean them up - all the software does that sort of thing these days. But there's not many packages of audio editing that come with their own guitar effects rack so you can take any recording and turn it into a Led Zeppelin solo? Why??? What for??  Sorry its a geek thing

It allows me to put a decent sound package alongside Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements. Now I can happily fool around with audio, images and film and mix between them all - the audio has been a real gap in Adobe's armoury and pricing their other sound application Soundbooth around the same level as Audition is just downright confusing.  I think I'm sorted now.

spam spam spam is starting to get to me

This is going to sound like a right old fashioned rant but have you noticed how many fraudulent emails there are about these days? The spam filters are pretty good at pushing most of it out of sight  but what has got me going this time is how accepting we are of the stuff.

Some one mailed me today to suggest I mailed his secretary to collect the $1.6 million due to me. Soldiers in Iraq ask me to fence gold bullion for them. I get pious messages from widows in Africa who in the name of the Lord plead with me to help them out of a fix and collect a coupla million in recompense.  I know police forces are overstretched and all that but it seems we have got so used to this kind of crap that we just put up with it.  But this kind of fraud is continual and widespread and in the long term must increase our cynicism about the internet - are the only people you can trust friends of friends referred by email or who you have met in the offline world? In 1993 when William Gibson polished off his seminal work Neuromancer which among other things brought the word cyberspace into general usage could he have imagined that before you strapped on your holodeck and disappeared into the matrix you would have to clear your spam filters of the daily crap accumulating there before you had a chance of cracking the ice around a corporate mainframe. Mebbe we should start some tit for tat spamming of West Africa - there have to be a few mugs who'll fall for it......

Mirage - display gadget

Things you don't need but really really want - the tagline for Iwantoneofthose.com - the gadget website. And here's one that had me from hello. A device that projects an image literally out of thin air. Perfect for those 1 to 1s with a client round a small meeting table. A conversation piece. And also useful for watching DVDs on the train back home.  Utterly brilliant. Transparency adjustable if you want to see through it.

Multilateralism and marketing

This blog doesn't usually wander into political territory and I don't actually want to go there now. But I was struck by Assad's aggressive speech claiming victory for Hezbollah as a defining moment for the unilateral policy making favoured by the US administration, by Israel and by Blair as unswerving Bush supporter. Unilateralism isn't working. The trouble with behaving unilaterally is that it is a less effective way (even using force) of getting people to do what you want. So far the unilateral policies since 9/11 have had the opposite effect - an increase in nationalism, anti western feeling and a decrease in world stability and safety for citizens of every nationality. Who now believes that western powers are working in the middle east with the support of those who live there and those who rule them?

Marketing has conventionally behaved unilaterally with its talk of targeting and audiences. Even this year's favoured euphemism engagement involves marketers finding the surefire techniques for making their customers engage. Multilateralism takes longer but has more chance of success because it works on the basis of win win. Everybody has to get something out of it.  With audiences not paying attention or even switching off in droves, multilateralism is the only way you can get the result you are after, when you want it. Because the other parties are willing to go along with it.

It probably didn't help that I watched Team America last night on DVD - multilateralism rules - OK? - OKOKOKOKOKOKOKOK

Best friends

Was on the London Underground yesterday and found myself in the middle of a school outing.  We're talking school girls here prob 14-15 hence no picture because you can get arrested for that sort of thing - ipods were conspicuously in evidence - and meant that friends were paired off with an earphone stuck in each ear. what really got my attention was two girls who had 2 ipods and who had an earphone apiece from each ipod so were grazing 2 channels at once. That I suppose is the difference between friends and best friends. But it it showed how an object as trivial as a head set can become touchy feely. Talking to a friend up close with one of their earpieces in your own ear is intimate and not dissimilar to holding hands (not very British) or an arm over the shoulder. Technology has been becoming more intimate for some time. But this shows how far we've moved from the days when the Walkman ruled.

Um hello

This blog is launching to co-incide with the revamping of Planning Above and Beyond a website I have been running for over 5 years now and which friends tell me was a blog before blogs existed. There's also another website behind Planning Above and Beyond called accountplanning.net which will hold the back catalogue of postings from 2000 - there's a lot there.