Increasingly I find that if I enter a search on Google for something that I need explaining to me, the first result is a book. Of course, the book is in Google’s Book Search, but chances are the search is in a page that has been scanned and is available without having to buy the book. What I’m not clear about are the implications of this.

(The above example is from me finding myself watching a UK quiz show from 2001 on the BBC’s Entertainment Channel, which I noticed is free this month on our local cable network. As a long-term expat I find these programs compelling viewing, because they offer a window on a culture I’ve lost access to huge chunks of. So when they ask about something old, I’m good, but if it’s a reference to EastEnders since 1987, I’m stumped. Hence the search for what ‘bank’ means on The Weakest Link.)

So back to the implications. Well, Google may be gaming the system. But it looks like a legit result to me:

I don’t really understand how this works—I always thought links to a page affected its prominence in the rankings, but I’m not complaining. I found what I was looking for. But what does this mean for books? For publishing? Do authors and publishers try to SEO their books? Or will it eat into sales? Is it worth book-ising a website so that it scores higher on Google? Is it worth putting ads into books so when they appear in the scanned form on Google Book Search, readers see the ads? Just some thoughts.

I’m amazed by how word processing is still in the dark ages, considering it’s what we spend most of our day doing. Case in point is Microsoft Word 2007, which throws all sorts of weirdness—artefacts, I guess we’d call them—in text. Try scrolling through a longish document—anything over 5,000 words—and you get this kind of thing (see above) where three lines repeat themselves. And it’s not just a brief, trick of the eye type thing. It sits there like a dumb duck until you fiddle with it and it goes away.

I’m very surprised that this kind of thing happens, and that it happens on such a regular basis. These are not complicated files that contain big tables or fancy graphics, or imported ones. They’re normal Word files.

It tends to confirm my suspicion that software developers rarely concentrate honing the functions that we actually spend most time in. There’s a tendency to add features, or change interfaces, or in some ways to count value, not in terms of making sure the basics work well, but in the stuff around it. (And no, sadly OpenOffice.org isn’t a whole lot better.

I guess what I’d like to see is someone come up with a real word processor: something that really processes words properly. So far I don’t think we’re there.

More stuff from the observant and thought-provoking Nokia researcher Jan Chipchase: drivers protecting their cars in Beijing from urinating canines: 

As Jan points out, lots of issues arise with this: how confused must dogs get that their choice of territory markers move around? (Or maybe that’s exactly what they want—expanding territory without them having to do anything.) But I guess for me is the weird thing that people have over their cars these days. Cars seem to be much clearner than they used to be.

Even in dusty, messy places like Jakarta you knew you could always beat the other guy to a spare corner of road just because you cared less about your car’s bodywork than he did. Here in Singapore people’s cars are so shiny you could eat off them. Apartments may look a mess but the car—the most visible reflection of people’s affluence—is glittering.

Then there’s the thing about hotels, restaurants and clubs allowing the owners of fancy cars to park right outside the lobby. Never quite understood how that works in practice. How do you know whether your car is fancy enough to merit this treatment? Would my Kijang KF42 cut it? It had a chrome trim thing going on which I thought was quite fancy.

Jan Chipchase - Future Perfect: Ownership = Target

 
Illustration IHT, by Felipe Galindo

I wrote a piece for the IHT on a company of expats bringing wireless broadband to their native Bangladesh. Would love to have gone there to have a look, but budgets aren’t what they were (love the illustration):

In Bangladesh, where less than 1 percent of the population has Internet access and where the rare broadband connection is prohibitively expensive, bridging the digital divide may require new approaches.

A group of Bangladeshi expatriates think they have found one that could work - a plan to bring affordable Internet access to their homeland through a blend of high-end wireless technology and social entrepreneurship.

Bringing Bangladesh into the Internet age - International Herald Tribune

I like Evernote but I’ve always found the notes a bit messy: different fonts, lots of weird formatting, and not particularly easy to read and scan through.

That seems to have changed with their latest version, where the notes are decently sized, free of too much extraneous stuff and easily distinguished from each other with elegant gray space.

Amazing how a few user interface tweaks—to make things simpler and more intuitive than to impress and show off-turn a maybe into a must-have.

Shocking pricing from New Zealand’s vodafone, the first country to launch the iPhone 3G. A $200 iPhone? More like $2,000-$5,000 after charges.

As ReadWriteWeb points out:

Carrier greed worldwide is probably the major reason why the Mobile Web is struggling to take off.

You can’t blame them for trying to make some money while they still can, because that scraping sound is the rats trying to secure stowage on a sinking ship.

Vodafone NZ Charges "Like a Wounded Bull" For iPhone 3G - ReadWriteWeb

Lifehacker just pointed to a four-year old entry on how to fold a newspaper:

Real Simple magazine has an old but good step-by-step guide to folding an unwieldy broadsheet newspaper for easy reading on the go. It's really just a matter of a few well placed folds, but if you don't already have a good folding strategy, this post is a great starting point. On the other hand, if you're a newspaper-folding pro and your methods differ from Real Simple's guide, let's hear all about how you make it work in the comments.

Of course, my first reaction was the same as some of the commenters: “What?? Next we’ll be taught how to blow our nose!” But actually it’s quite informative, and I notice that it’s exactly how my dad would read the paper.

Of course, he never taught me how to do that, and I’ll probably never need to teach my kids how to do it. “Fold a newspaper? Are you insane, Dad?” Instead, they’ll be reading on their Readius:

And that’s the point: My use of the newspaper is bound up in my memory of my father reading the newspaper. We as children mimic adults, so it was a sign of maturity for me to read the newspaper—or rather, for me to master the newspaper. That didn’t mean just reading it, but handling it—folding it, creasing it, carrying it under my arm, swishing it in the air when I turned a page, tut-tutting at the goings-on of the world.

Another moment yesterday elicited the same thought: Banished to the kitchen I was listening to the Wimbledon Men’s Final on the radio while my wife watched it on the TV. Of course, it’s vastly preferable to watch it rather than listen to it, but still the atmosphere created by the commentator on the radio was so powerful, his descriptions so flawless and compelling, that I found myself preferring it to the easy visuals of the TV.

What’s more, it took me back to those schooldays clustered around the radio listening to the second-half commentary of soccer matches on Saturday afternoon, or, radio under pillow after lights-out with the volume on 1, following an evening UEFA Cup tie between my team and some exotic-sounding team from behind the Iron Curtain. It was so magical, so dramatic, the inflexions of the commentator so perfect, I am forever transported back to those moments whenever I hear sport being described in real time on radio.

Of course my wife thought me absurd for prefering audio over visual. And I readily accept it is. But it’s like newspapers: beyond the obvious argument that some formats trump others in certain situations (newspapers over computers in the bath; cellphones over newspapers on crowded transport), there’s also the fact that we connect emotionally to the formats, not just because of habit, but because they evoke deeper feelings—to the past, to familiarity, to a sense of habit and ritual.

Most debates about newspapers nowadays are about when they’ll die out. I don’t believe this will happen, because they represent a format that still trumps others in certain situations. But beyond the practical there’s an emotional element too, and perhaps the challenge of ‘old’ media is to capture some of these emotional connections—newspapers strewn around in Starbucks, free, throwaway radios for listening to commentary at big games—in order to inject fresh life into the medium.

After all, it’s not just about reading yourself up-to-date. It’s about the physical pleasure of reading, of feeling at peace and in the security of a familiar habit.

Reading: How to Fold a Broadsheet Newspaper

with this:

(and notice the Compact Mode option that I couldn’t find in the 4.0 version.)

What bothers me is that Skype already know this is a problem. Try to download a different version of Skype after the beta, and you’re confronted with a (rather creepy) questionnaire as they try to find out why you’re doing what you’re doing. One of the answers:

Well, d’oh. If you knew that was a problem, then why not make it an option to reduce the screen size? Compare this to something like Google Talk, which couldn’t get any smaller:

or even some of those twitter clients. I know the video is supposed to be great on the new version of Skype, but if you’re not actually running video, what’s the excuse for such a desktop-hogging client? I can’t think of one.

(update: after two days of nothing, the device is now booting again and Panasonic have offered to take a closer look at it and tell me what happened.)

My faith in my Panasonic Toughbook took a bath today when a waitress poured coffee all over it (and me.) It’s that absurd thing that waiters do of having to put coffee and food down right next to you when you’re clearly in the middle of a key discussion/interview/meeting/nap. It was bound to happen.

Still, I held out hope the Toughbook would be up to it. After all, the videos show guys doing stuff to their Toughbook we wouldn’t do to our partners (unless they asked us to.) I splashed the coffee off under a tap, knowing the damage coffee can wreak. To no avail: within minutes the screen went blank and the thing died.

Now I know why they call them ‘drop- and spill- resistant”. If it’s a spill, you might be ok, so long as it’s purified water. And “resistant”? It resists it, like Niles would Maris.

I bought a new one and am charging the hotel for it; they’ve agreed but I’ll send the lawyers home when I see the money. I happen to have a recording of the point when the coffee is spilt. It goes something like this:

Interviewee: in a fast growth  economy like India. Bangladesh, meanwhile.. [sound of crockery slipping, liquid spilling] oo shit!

Flaks (in chorus): oh no!

Me: (bizarrely quietly) Interesting…

Flaks (in chorus): oh dear!

Me: (still bizarrely quietly) OK…

[Sound of waitress disemboweling self with sugar spoon]

Lessons from all this?

• Don’t order coffee in five star hotel lobbies when you’ve got a laptop in the area.
• Don’t believe any waterproof claims from laptop manufacturers. Turns out that spillage only applies to the keyboard. You can see the waitress managed to get the latte everywhere except the keyboard.
• Don’t settle for less from those responsible than full replacement immediately. I made it clear to the phalanx of hotel management that they would face serious claims if I did not check and rehouse the hard drive as quickly as possible and that meant buying a replacement computer immediately (it helped I was down the road from the place I bought it at the time. Singapore is like that.) It’s not about the computer: it’s really about the data, but it’s also about your day. You’re a working stiff and you don’t deserve to sit on your hands while they try to wriggle out of a full refund.
• Back up your data regularly. I was lucky; the hard drive was safe. But I bet a lot wouldn’t be.

This, by the way, is what Panasonic say at the bottom of the page on spillage:

Furthermore, if you spill coffee, soft drinks, or similar liquids on the computer, the keyboard or other parts of the unit may become stained. Sugar and other substances may also cause corrosion, so liquids other than water are more problematic. Deal with such spills in the same way as directed for water and then have the unit checked.

Be aware that the spill resistance of these products in no way guarantees that liquids will not harm them or cause breakdowns.

FolderShare will be offline for a little while (48-72 hours) next week for some server upgrades.

• The outage begins Tuesday, June 17, at 6 PM Pacific Times (UTC-7).
• We hope to be back online by 6 PM Friday at the latest.

I share some of the disbelief of commenters to the blog post and ZDNet’s Michael Krigsman:

Users are attracted to services such as FolderShare for two reasons: useful features and the promise of always-on reliability. Remove reliability from the equation and the service’s value plummets.

(Zoliblog also points to some odd, unexplained changes in the way FolderShare works, whereby the index of files you’re syncing between two computers appears to now be stored on Microsoft’s servers. Whether this is important remains to be seen.)

The bigger point is this: If we are genuinely going to shift computing to the cloud—move our stuff online, think in terms of being able to compute from anywhere, anytime—then we need to have reliable access to our files and accounts.

That Microsoft, of all people, can switch off such access for up to three days in the middle of the week highlights the inadequacies of that thinking. In the longer run it may be that we are in error for considering relying on cloud computing, and Microsoft, for access to our stuff.

(The arguments that it’s free, and in beta, don’t wash. Imagine if Google took Gmail or Google Docs down for three days: beta no longer means broken, at least not for the majority of a working week.)

Windows Live FolderShare Team Blog: Planned system outage starting June 17