Friday, January 14, 2005

I'm on the train. HELLO, HELLO...

As a regular commuter into London on the train, I have become increasingly sensitive to the decibel-fueled Dom Joly school of mobile phone conversations. Part of the problem has been the unfortunate demise of a Christmas 'Ministry of Sound' MP3 player which, true to brand, finds it impossible to function in daylight.

With all of the hype surrounding Macworld this week, from the launch of the Mac Mini to the iPod Shuffle, I recall with great fondness the first Walkman that I bought some fifteen years ago. By some strange combination of consumer abuse and state-of-the-Ark engineering, one of the side effects of its increasingly erratic performance, is that it blocks out mobile phone signals within a short radius. All I need to do is to find some old stock, bury it in the garden for 11 months and it will be Christmas 2005's top commuter gadget.

Thursday, January 13, 2005

The blogger is back in town

Niall Cook's New Year resolution to unsubscribe from every email newsletter to switch to RSS feeds is laudable. At this time of year, information overload is at its worst, as you return from the New Year excesses to a mass of emails as impenetrable as the weather outside. The convenience of RSS feeds, such as Bloglines, helps to manage information overload by having access to your news sources in one place and allows you to keep bang up-to-date with new articles published.

The pressures of the New Year have made it difficult to keep up with the blog, so I can only admire the prolific output of fellow blogger Johnnie Moore, who has managed not just one, but four posts today. Whether he can maintain this output over the rest of the year or in facts works to a different calendar to the rest of us Brits, only time will tell.