Just My 2p

Microsoft in transition

noreply@blogger.com (just.my2p) — Wed, 05 Mar 2014 21:37:00 +0000

It undoubtedly happens at the top of all of the best companies but it is unexpected to see the spats at the top of Microsoft becoming so public.

First we have Steve Ballmer calling MS a “two and a half trick pony” and saying that they “got a bit behind” in the mobile space, and using that to justify the Nokia purchase. http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2014-03/04/ballmer-on-mobile-microsoft-nokia

Then the new CEO Nardella comes out fighting talking about the “tug of war over strategy and the clash of personalities” that dominated the last years of Ballmer's time at Microsoft.

It won't surprise anyone that you don't get to the top of a Tech giant without a strong personality, but I do find it surprising that Nardella is so keen on undermining the Nokia purchase so quickly by saying that Ballmer said that he “he couldn't be CEO if he didn't get his way” over Nokia. http://www.businessweek.com/news/2014-03-05/microsoft-ceo-nadella-inherits-legacy-of-ballmer-board-division.

It doesn't reflect well on anyone, and can't be building any confidence in the future of Nokia – and maybe that's the idea.

Either way, I for one am looking forward to this one running and running.

The Law of 2.1 or Downsie's Law

noreply@blogger.com (just.my2p) — Tue, 07 Jan 2014 10:23:00 +0000

We've all heard or Moore's Law and Murphy's Law, well I'd like to introduce my own piece of wisdom, Downsie's Law, otherwise known as the law of 2.1.

This comes out of many, many years of experience in the computer industry and being subject to the whims and commercial drivers of that business.

The law refers to the observation that versions 2.1 of anything is almost universally good, and are the ones that you should stick with.

The premise goes something like this. A developer comes up with a great idea and gets to a 1.0 release.

1.0 is a great idea and a good product. However, it hasn't been fully road tested and feedback gathered etc. So it is limited and it's limitations are soon identified. With any luck there will be a number of 1.n iterations where the product gets better and better each time, but because it is based on 1.0 code there are limits to what can be done.

2.0 is the next major release, and it's fantastic. All the problems with 1.n have been resolved, the underlying codebase has been overhauled to make better able to do the things you want it to. The rough edges have been smoothed off, developers have listened and it is a great, fully functional product. You love it. But, and there's always a but with point zero releases, it has bugs.

Of course it has bugs, the developers wanted to get all the goodies in there and they were pushed for a release date - they don't want to disappoint their customers and they have crammed they can into the release.

Sometime after comes the 2.1 release which has all the goodness of 2.0 with added stability and robustness. And it's fantastic, as the saying goes, this one's a keeper.

After that, things generally go downhill, the code gets bloated, features get added that only appeal to a small percentage of the users, release cycles get set in stone and management start making the decisions on direction and everything gets more complex, complicated and slow. After time you start thinking wistfully about how good 2.1 was and how your life was better before version 3.

Scary juxtaposition on the BBC web site

noreply@blogger.com (just.my2p) — Wed, 27 Nov 2013 10:36:00 +0000

Two recent news articles that showed up on the BBC Business web pages

Are these two stories connected do you think?

Halliwell's Film Guide

noreply@blogger.com (just.my2p) — Mon, 30 Sep 2013 21:43:00 +0000

Just picked up (thank you Internet and Alibris books) a copy of Halliwell's Film Guide 7th Edition, fabulous.

For those of you who don't know, Leslie Halliwell took it upon himself to create a guide to movie watching, his Filmgoers Companion (of which I am still looking for a good copy of ), which was a quirky and personal review of hundreds of films that he thought were significant, as well as a compendium of actors, director, technicians and other "crafts".

The films in the Companion were just a Halliwell's personal favourites or in some ways significant. The Film Guide however, attempted to be a more complete work.

Not only did the Film Guide contain many more films, but it included more production details - Director, cast etc. This was an astonishing achievement, given that this was pre-internet and there was no easy way to do this - it took a massive effort to collect all of this data together.

What is really marvellous about these books is the opinion that Halliwell had. He pulls no punches and can be very pithy in his comments. A word of warning though, Halliwell died in 1989 and the series was continued by others - with dire consequences. So the Film Guide is only good up to the 7th Edition and the Filmgoers Companion up to the

This means that these are the kind of books that you can dip in and out of, knowing that you will be amused, intrigued and challenged every time you read them. Not only that, you will end up re-appraising some of your favourite films.

Think of them like IMDB with prejudice (in the best way), opinion and an acerbic wit.

A word of warning though, the editions after Halliwell's death are pale imitations and IMHO not worth the paper they are printed on. Go for the 7th Edition of the Film Guide or earlier and Companion up to '77.

I used to have a 6th Edition, I hope Wendy is looking after it and enjoying it.

Mail-Online taking Liberties with "alt" text

noreply@blogger.com (just.my2p) — Sat, 13 Jul 2013 10:31:00 +0000

For those of you that don't know "alt" text is an attribute of HTML that is used to provide alternative text for non-graphical browsers and is also used by visually impaired people to understand what an image is showing. They are invaluable if you can't actually see what's on screen and are listening via a screen reader.

"alt" tags are also used by some in the SEO industry to reiterate to the search engines what a page is about. The extra keywords can inform Google.

However, sometimes they are used for more unscrupulous ways. Because Google does look at "alt" text you can use them to add content to Google that you wouldn't normally put on your site.

In this instance the Daily Mail, via it's online rag has added the following alt text to an image

In a story headlined "The dirty tricks dossier: ANDREW PIERCE reveals Labour's union vote-rigging scandal is far more extensive -..."

This picture of Len McCluskey

has the "alt" text of:

"Unite has given Labour more than £8 million since 2010. In Len McCluskey, it has a general-secretary whose political heroes are Lenin and Arthur Scargill"

rather than the more accurate IMHO "Unite general-secretary speaking through a megaphone."

Nowhere in the picture is there any indication that his heroes include Lenin.

And what the Daily Mail has done here is make a connection between Len McCluskey and both Lenin and Arthur Scargill that may, or may not be true, and they have hidden it from their readers. For me there are questions about both their motives, and why they felt it necessary to hide it from their readers in that way.

Let's have another housing bubble

noreply@blogger.com (just.my2p) — Sun, 31 Mar 2013 22:04:00 +0000

We are still suffering the fallout from the biggest asset bubble in modern history, yet the politicians seem hell bent on re-inflating the property bubble in the UK.

We are still living with an over priced property sector, initially fuelled by cheap credit and the idea that property would continue to grow in value at a faster rate than the rest of the economy and now propped up by virtually non-existent interest rates.

Now, these truths are to me self evident, the idea that there is a "property ladder" without a "property snake" in very easy to sell to people. Property never goes down runs the common perception, and the whole industry is complicit in this lie. This is really appealing as it seems to promise endless growth with no risk. The reality is though that your house doesn't get any bigger (and hence more valuable) so any rise in what is considered value is purely a collective delusion.

What continually astonishes me is that politicians of all persuations in the UK see the only answer to our economic woes. The latest example being George Osborne's ludicrous new plan to get the UK taxpayer to underwrite mortgages for new builds. The idea being that the private sector won't take the risk, therefore the taxpayer has to. Bonkers.

This will just lead to price inflation as part of the risk calculation is removed and people can borrow more than is commercially realistic.

It is a policy that is a legacy from the Thatcher years and the rush to home ownership that she ushered in. Those voters who have gained from the massive house price inflation over the past 25 years need to be placated and pandered too by the political classes. If not they stop voting for them.

A life in Advertising

noreply@blogger.com (just.my2p) — Thu, 14 Feb 2013 10:33:00 +0000

Very painful, but very true

http://www.lindsredding.com/2012/03/11/a-overdue-lesson-in-perspective/

A retrospective on a life in advertising. Mind you, there's a load of bitterness in there that is all about what old men think of their lives and what younger people do.

And hey, don't forget that the world is a different place now and everything really is harder.

Was Lord Farquad really based on Richard III?

noreply@blogger.com (just.my2p) — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 13:20:00 +0000

Pure speculation on my part here, but was there a connection.

What really brings this into focus is the recent discovery of the bones of Richard III underneath a car park in Leicester.

Having done the DNA analysis to confirm that the bones really were of the reviled English King Richard III, the archaeologists who discovered the remains decided to use the latest facial reconstruction techniques they set about creating a lifelike model of the medieval king.

After many months of painstaking effort they came up with this:

Now the truth is clear for all to see, Lord Farquad from the Shrek movies is clearly Richard III, or is it the other way round?

Co-incidence? I think not.

Yellow Snow Warning from the BBC?

noreply@blogger.com (just.my2p) — Sun, 20 Jan 2013 09:37:00 +0000

My favourite piece of reporting about the snowy weather we are having is from the BBC web site which states:

There are also yellow snow warnings for eastern parts of England and Scotland, stretching across the Midlands into north Wales.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-21106626

Updating Windws XP in Virtualbox

noreply@blogger.com (just.my2p) — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 11:37:00 +0000

As everything slows down in Windows it came time to add more resources to my Windows XP running in Virtualbox.

Memory, not a problem just add some more in the VirtualBox Settings. Don't add more than 4 GB as Windows XP can't use it. Increase the Disk size.

I was running short of disk and wanted to extend the VDI. This is easily managed using

vboxmanage modifyhd "vdi file name" --resize "size you want in mb"

in my case it was vboxmanage modifyhd NewXP.vdi --resize 20480

That increases the size of the disk under VirtualBox, you now need to extend the partition for Windows to make use of it.

My solution was to use Gparted iso image.

Download a GPartEd ISO and save it somewhere where VirtualBox can find it. Boot your WIndows XP machine using the GpartEd iso image as the virtual cd in VIrtualbox. GParted will then let you extend the partition to use all of the disk. Restart into Windows XP to check that you have all the disk accessible. Windows may CHKDSK on reboot, this is normal.

Finally I added an additional cpu core to the VistualBox machine under the machine settings.

Windows can't see use the additional core until it has a multicore kernel and HAL in place. To do this Turn off Driver Signing in Wondows XP by going through

My Computer:Properties:Hardware:Driver Signing and set it to ignore (you can set this back afterwards if you so wish)

Then run (from the command line)

rundll32 syssetup,SetupInfObjectInstallAction ACPIAPIC_MP_HAL 128 %windir%\inf\hal.inf

A couple of reboots and Bob's you uncle a re-juvinated Windows XP.

Osborne and Cameron Relaxed about Tax Returns

noreply@blogger.com (just.my2p) — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 04:04:00 +0000

Well they would be wouldn't they. With million pound assets, and the capability of organising their affairs so as to reduce the amount of income that appears on their tax returns they don't have a problem really.

As the beneficiary of an offshore trust (that owns 15% of Osborne and Little) the chancellor could of course just take loans from the trust - which don't count as income.

And let's face it, the whole point of Tax Avoidance is not showing income on your Tax Return surely.

It's getting tight at the top

noreply@blogger.com (just.my2p) — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 20:52:00 +0000

The run in to the end of the season seems to start earlier and earlier each year.

I'm not really complaining, after all, the excitement is intoxicating and it gives every game an edge and a sense of danger. But I wonder if it takes away from the beauty of the game?

I mean that in a sense it reduces the last third of the season to a nail biting experience where you are fearful of losing and relieved at winning. It's all about a point here and a point there, goal difference and holding ones nerve. And what happens is that the games get scrappier and scrappier.

We lose the beautiful, flowing games where the skill of the team translates into the kind of passing game that we all enjoy and love. Where creativity and fun seem to be as important as winning. Where winning is the just reward for playing well, and the manner of the victory is still important.

Maybe I'm supporting the wrong team, maybe Wenger has got it right and is more interested in playing beautiful football than winning trophies.

Nah, bring on the grinding one nil victory and bring on the Premiership Trophy.

How to defrost a freezer the quick way

noreply@blogger.com (just.my2p) — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 20:23:00 +0000

Just thought I'd pass on this tip.

Next time you want to defrost your freezer, start by arming yourself with a desk fan. Any size will do,but something like 9" is ideal. Then, when you have emptied everything out of it and switched the power (or pressed the defrost button) put the fan in front of the open freezer, and switch it on.

That's it.

A heavily frosted freezer will take approximately one hour to complete, so make sure you keep on top of emptying your water collection vessel.

The fan keeps pushing warm air into the freezer which melts the ice, without this airflow the air stays cold which keeps the ice cold.

Simple, but very effective.

Is Minecraft the most addictive game in the world?

noreply@blogger.com (just.my2p) — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 20:08:00 +0000

Apparently, yes.

My three children, 12, 11 and 7 years old, the older two boys, cannot stop playing with it. It starts 1st thing in the morning with the first one up asking to get on Minecraft, then the others one after the other. Bizarre. The threat of taking it away from them is enough to guarantee good behaviour.

They all have their own worlds, but equally play together or on their own. They are constantly building new houses,underground world, flying spaceships, extensive waterworks of canals and pools, cottages, castles, theme parks and mazes.

All of this in the simplest of games, with the simplest of rules.

So, move over Angry Birds Minecraft probably is the most addictive game in the world.

A games that had everything

noreply@blogger.com (just.my2p) — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 22:34:00 +0000

Hats off to Chelsea this evening for their triumph in the Champions League knockout stage against Napoli.

It was a game that had it all really, what I consider to be one of those great nights of European Football.

Chelsea, having lost fairly comprehensively away from home in the first leg, but getting the valuable away goal. A new (temporary) manager and a few blips in their home league form. Napoli coming here knowing that they would probably need a goal to settle things. Controversy surrounding Chelsea's senior players who having been out of favour with their last manager have been accused of undermining him to get him sacked, and who have now been restored to the starting lineup.

And the match didn't disappoint. A slow start by the home side, who looked like the away side for the first 20 minutes or so. Chances for Napoli that went begging. Brought to life at the half hour mark by a superbly worked goal for Drogba getting in front of his defender to head home. Game on.

Who else but Chelsea Captain John Terry gets the second from a cheaply won corner. At this point Chelsea are through. So Napoli come back at them and get their just rewards with a cracking volley that makes it 2:1 on the night and 3:4 on aggregate. Napoli in ascendency now.

Chelsea respond in kind and win a penalty courtesy of a handball in the Napoli box, up steps Frank Lampard (another of the senior players) and he smashes it past the keeper 15 minutes from the end to make the tie all square at 4 all.

By now the game had lost all shape and the play sureged from end to end, with no-one able to break the deadlock. At full time it was still a draw, so we went into 30 minutes of extra time.

And the drama wasn't over either as John Terry was off, and both teams went for it as they had nothing to lose. It swung on way, then the other until from a cross from Drogba is crashed into the net by Ivanovic and it's Chelsea ahead again.

Sustained pressure from Napoli after that, but Chelsea doggedly hold out and are through to the last 8.

And, breathe in, breathe out and relax.

Man City playing the long game

noreply@blogger.com (just.my2p) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 21:53:00 +0000

Man City's owners are engaged in a desperate bid to get a worldwide following before it's too late.

I am not sure I really know the reasons behind the pumping of vast amounts of money into what was, in reality, an underperforming and overlooked team who's heyday was in the seventies. That's right Manchester City. But I can have a good guess.

The commercial landscape of football is changing and as with a lot of industries there becomes a point where the top dogs get into a position where they are able to change the rules to protect their position. I think that football is about to go the same way. The other thing that is happening is the new FIFA rules that will force clubs to become "profitable" is limited ways, i.e. you can't just run them at a massive loss a la Chelsea. That will be a real limiting factor in a couple of years time.

Currently the money that floods into football comes from three main activites, gate receipts, merchandising/commercial operations and TV rights.

Gate receipts are mostly fixed, and certainly to a large extent capped. The big clubs in England tend to max out at 75,000 or so and are kept pretty full (although not as full as they might like every game)We don't seem to go in for the mega stadiums that some of our european competitors do, and maybe because there are other avenues open.

Merchandising and other commercial activities can bring in massive amounts too. This is mostly on the back of kit sales and sponsorship. As the game goes more and more global, this can be grown, and we see this with the Far East tours that clubs undertake and the signing of certain players, Park-Ji Sung being a good example - he is a great player, but I would be surprised if his background wasn't a factor too. And one of the things that supports merchandising sales is the third leg, TV.

TV rights are where the big bucks are. The huge amounts paid by the pay TV channels are the driving force behind the floods of money in the game. At present the game rights are sold collectively, by the Premier League, and the money is distributed fairly amongst the clubs. This works well for the TV companies - and for the majority of the clubs, who all benefit from the popularity of the largest clubs. You can't get Man Utd without getting Wigan. And these collective rights are sold worldwide too.

At some point maybe sooner maybe later these rights are going to be sold on a per club basis, probably starting with the overseas rights first. If you are Arsenal, Chelsea or Man Utd you have a vested interest in doing so because you have a big enough overseas fan base to make your rights valuable, if you are Swansea you probably don't. And until recently, if you were Man City you didn't.

My view is that pumping money into Man City is an exercise in getting global as fast as you can, regardless of cost, before the FIFA rules come in. The prize, is eating at the top table for the foreseeable future. And in that scenario the money being spent by Man City looks cheap.

Descending into technology hell

noreply@blogger.com (just.my2p) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 21:55:00 +0000

Underneath it all, I'm a techie through and through. Not just a dabbler (hmmm maybe that's questionable now), but a full on deep, deep techie.

I mean, I know more than is healthy for people about network protocols, and I don't mean knowing what TPC/IP means, I still know what SNA and SDLC were, how to trouble shoot Token Ring networks and the makeup of an ethernet packet, asynchronous wan traffic, Virtual Circuits and X25 the list oges on.

And I have always loved hardware, whether it's opening up a server and appreciating the engineering that has gone into it (hardware porn as we know it), or just building my own PCs (writing this on one)I have always been happy to roll my sleeves up and wield a screwdriver.

So it is galling to find myself getting deeper and deeper into the well of technical problems, with no light of inspiration coming on.

It all started with a NAS box, an HP Proliant Microserver to be precise. A really nice bit of kit. A 12" cube with a low power (15w) CPu, space for 4 full size drives up to 8gb ram, perfect. I thought I'd go with ZFS for the storage, so it made sense to use Solaris, in this case Nexentastor community edition, full on storage appliance class software.

This stuff works, other people have got it working, it shouldn't be a problem. Download an iso, burn it and install. It grinds along for an age, doesn't fail, just sort of grinds to a halt. Hmmmm. OK download again, recheck the md5, burn again - same result. Next, memcheck still nothing fails. Swap the cd drive, no joy, the flash, no joy, he memory, no joy, the disks, no joy. Hardware seems not to be a problem, install Ubuntu - it works.

Back to the drawing board, previous release? No. Other hardware? No. Another microserver? No.

Bloody stumped and run out of time, bearing in mind that I am doing this in hour/2 hour sprints late at night. Stalled for now.

If that wasn't bad enough, I have a crucial m4 SSD (I cannot express how much I love SSDs), which decides to stop working. Not permanently, oh no that would be too easy, no this would stop about an hour after booting. Hair duly torn out, I mean how can this happen, its solid state it works or it doesn't. Eventually this is tracked down to a sodding firmware issue that kicks in after 5000 hours or so. Crucial eventually admit this, but will not have a fix out for two whole weeks! Sh*t.

That's now two computers down, but at least I have my toshiba laptop, hah that's what I thought. It duly decides to screw me up more by finding rare and unusual ways of powering itself off. Its a great laptop, lightweight and powerful looks good and works well good keyboard lots to like really. But it decides that if you hold it by anywhere to the left of the keyboard it poweres down bigtime, the onky way to get it to power up again is by taking the battery out and replacing it.

all of a sudden I have no computers left, and the family are not happy. Not at all.

There you go, technology hell (lucky I had an old Acer Revo to keep the home front at bay...)

Money, money, money, must be funny, in a football world

noreply@blogger.com (just.my2p) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 22:20:00 +0000

So, Harry's in court again, has he blown his chances of making England Coach?

Now, I don't intend to argue the rights or wrongs of this case, it is still going through court and I don't have enough knowledge to make a considered judgement. Let's wait for the court to decide on his guilt or not, and any sentence.

I would normally expect that this would end all chances of him being appointed England coach, but with the lack of other options you never know what the FA may do, and how they may justify it. There certainly aren't many other English candidates and they may be inclined to give it to Harry regardless. Let's wait and see, although I must say that I would personally be appalled if they did.

What has surprised me, and in hindsight I should have seen this coming, was that Harry Redknapp was paid a 10% commission on every player he sold. That's right, he was rewarded for selling players.

Now correct me if I am wrong, but I thought that a Managers job was to keep his players and to get the best results for the team - not to trade players for commission. Surely the reward for the manager for getting the most money for a player that they sold (reluctantly or otherwise) was to be able to improve his team, not line his own pocket?

I would have thought at there would be some form of a commercial director or finance director whose job it was to maximise the proceeds of a sale, and to put that on the club's bottom line. Have we moved so far away from any normal practice that this would be acceptable. Incentivising the manager to sell players seems to me to involve some kind of conflict of interest.

Better people than me I am sure will do the sums of who he sold, and what he may have been paid and compare that to league progress etc. and we can only wonder what could have been achieved, or not.

And I bet none of the money made its way to grassroots, youth football.

Football Funding

noreply@blogger.com (just.my2p) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 21:29:00 +0000

I have a friend whose son is a decent footballer at 10 years old. He plays in the local league (above his age group). Whilst he is never going to be a premier league footballer, it is something that he enjoys and it is a big part of his life.

This is all good.

The English Premier League, the FA, the Champions League and the clubs within the premier league are awash with money. Rolling in it, gorging on it £1.78bn from Sky for 2010-13, spending it lavishly - (Fernando Torres was sold for £50m, that's more than the cost of a School) if not wisely. Paying players £200k a week for goodness sake. In the UK the average price of a semi-detached house is £200k or a week's wages for some footballers.

Now, they all talk about the importance of grass roots football, of putting something back into the game, about the importance of the fans etc.

Bullshit.

My friends 10 year old has to pay about £50 a month for the privilege of playing in a local league. £12.50 a week to cover training sessions, matches etc. this is not an inconsiderable sum. It excludes many and discourages others.

We should all be ashamed of this. We bemoan the lack of home grown talent in the Premier League, yet we neglect investment in our youngsters. And these are the children who support the Premier League teams and help fund the players' excessive lifestyles.

So when you hear about John Terry's £4.6m mortgage remember that's about 92,000 children-months of football.

Harry Nilsson and Brandy Alexanders

noreply@blogger.com (just.my2p) — Sun, 08 Jan 2012 22:16:00 +0000

Delighted to find out that Harry Nilsson and John Lennon were great drinking buddies whose favorite tipple was the cocktail Brandy Alexander.

As a long time Nilsson fan, as well as a great drinker of cocktails it is nice to find the two strands coming together.

In earlier times (OK the early 80's) we used to go "cocktail bombing", where you turn up at someone's house with a cocktail shaker and the ingredients to a cocktail, and all get smashed. Ideally with something that wasn't that well known,after all we can all make a screwdriver.

One of my favorites at the time was a Brandy Alexander. Brandy, Cream and Creme de Cacao, sprinkled with chocolate. Many happy times were had with that simple combination.

Happy times.

Has Ubuntu lost it?

noreply@blogger.com (just.my2p) — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 13:44:00 +0000

Well I am back on 11.04 Natty Narwhal again and everything is tickety boo on the desktop.

I don't really want to move to Unity or Gnome 3 if I can avoid it, but may have to put up with it.

Is that age kicking in? After all I have lived from command line on mainframes to where I am today, through Dumb Terminals, DOS (loads), Sidekick, Gem, OS/2 PM, Openwave, Motif, OpenLook, Gnome, KDE all of which I have used in anger on various platforms over the years.

Maybe I just don't want to invest the time and effort to make myself properly productive in a new environment. Sill I have until October 2012 to sort it out.

Cynical ploy to get backlinks? Not really

noreply@blogger.com (just.my2p) — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 13:36:00 +0000

Just soft launching our new Pancentric Search web site as a standalone SEO Agency web site.

Whilst we rank very well for search agency on our main web site, visitors get there and see a full service agency, not a search specialist and our bounce rate for those visitors is high. So we have set up a specialist search agency site where we can talk about our Holistic Search approach without compromising the effectiveness of our overall agency offering.

It will be interesting to see if this strategy works.

I've just read that back and it sounds a little awkward, I wonder whether I need to re-write the content in a less search friendly (if that's what it is) way? That would be ironic esp. given that that is not my intention.

Man Utd -New red devil causes consternation

noreply@blogger.com (just.my2p) — Wed, 09 Nov 2011 22:01:00 +0000

New red devil

Les Tourelles de Longueville 2006

noreply@blogger.com (just.my2p) — Sun, 30 Oct 2011 20:31:00 +0000

Not an expert review by any stretch of the imagination, not even an amateur.

I opened a bottle of this on Friday evening as I felt (after spending the day fighting off a cold and looking after my three little monsters) that I deserved it.

Of course the cold screwed my taste buds, not that it made such a difference. It was however bloody lovely.

Warm, welcoming, rich, smooth, with no sharp edges - a lovely, lovely wine. Just made to be savoured on an autumn evening while the world passes by. Nice tannins, not overly fruity (the 60+% merlot notwithstanding) an example of subtle winemaking.

A few bottles of these definitely needed

Who invented the iPod then?

noreply@blogger.com (just.my2p) — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 08:42:00 +0000

'Twas not Steve Jobs, it was Tony Fadell.

He took the whole concept from MP3 Player, iTunes etc. to Apple who bought it lock stock and barrel. Jobs clearly had a massive influence on the design and UX, but he wasn't the commercial brain behind it.

http://www.wired.com/gadgets/mac/news/2004/07/64286?currentPage=all

His greatness was picking it up and making it a success.