Thought Socks

Here’s a timeline of events post-Steve Jobs announcing the MacBook Air (Lowdown at Gizmodo) yesterday:

I begin a brief near-hysterical fit, punctuated by grunts and muffled yells encouraging anyone in the vicinity to get near a computer, any computer.
The general first opinion from anyone in the vicinity tends to be ‘Wow’, followed by ‘It’s so thin!’, and then inevitably ‘How much?’. I don’t notice this last question, and in fact haven’t yet taken note of the price at all.
A plan of action quickly forms in my head: I will pool all my monetary resources together and purchase myself one of these wonderful creations. When my ‘resources’ amount to around only £87.43 I scream, heartbroken - but wait: I can sell my family! Aha! But …

My damned nice and good consciousness dangles that familiar ‘Idiotic loser’ sign in front of my me-want-that compulsive consciousness’ face and I see sense.
I’m still in some sort of delirium and I contact a fellow MacBooking friend in mainly capitals to inform him of this news of news. He, er, likes it, but quickly points out that ‘it’s a bit pricey though?’

And with this, reason finally kicks in and I consider the price: £1200.

Now I don’t want to get into a Mac/Windows debate (I own and am equally enthusiastic about both), but could I not get a slightly less slim, slightly overweight laptop which runs on Windows, which is almost as portable, which has a disk drive, which has more memory, which has a firewire port, as well as everything the Air does have, for a lot less money? Of course, most would answer. But wait - I’m already in possession of this sacred item, and it’s actually not a Windows laptop, but an Apple MacBook; practically, it’s the Air but better, with a few extra pounds. It even looks pretty good too. And if we’re so portability-desperate, can’t we all just get an Asus Eee, at staggeringly almost 1/6 of the price? It provides everything you might need on the way to work or on holiday, unless you’re a member of commuting- or holiday-gamers (.org and .com respectively, and please don’t tell me these sites actually exist).

Apple have developed this product to compete directly with the Eee, and similar products like Sony’s Vaio VGN-T1XP. They’ve developed it because ultra-portables are the new big thang - because they’re big business. Because they expect it to sell. But, considering it’s price and lack of a disk drive, how do Apple expect their product to sell?

As I said, the Air bravely has no disk drive and is selling - again, bravely I suppose - for an extortionate amount of money. It really has not much at all going for it apart from it’s size and its looks. But that’s it - that’s how Apple will market and sell the Air; It’s aesthetics are basically Apple’s main selling point (Apart from the Air being an APPLE product of course). They can charge this high, high price for something you can realistically find for a lot less cash and still expect to sell bucket loads (Big buckets) because all the realistic alternatives are lacking in one aspect: The look. The Air is just so, damn sexy. To the internet generation, you with your Dell at school, college, work, wherever, will look out of touch and frankly just a bit silly. Your Dell will lend you a certain decrepit, old and even cheap look and will probably prompt in you many of the more annoying (For you as much as us) aspects of being old and decrepit. Even the aforementioned Sony Vaio will have the knees it perches so lightly on paling when it’s compared to the effortlessly sexy, simultaneously, classily, feminine and masculine, utterly, mesmerisingly wonderful aesthetics of the Air. The Air is the supercar of laptops. It’s the Samuel L. Jackson of men, the Scarlett Johanssen of women. It is glorious, and I want one.

But I can’t, in my current financial state, want one. I must force myself to go against all the instincts growing up in this aesthetically orientated society has instilled in me. I must hate myself, and in attempt to stop any further drooling over it’s (Albeit pointless) gloriousness, try to hate the Air, as I think so many others will.

Tours and hands on with MBA at Gizmodo.
Did Steve Jobs deliver? at dot.life.
MBA at notebooks.com.

More debate on the Education and Skills bill by the ones that make decisions.

Of the question, Andy Powell, Chief Exec. of education charity Edge, says this:

“The government’s bill to raise the education leaving age to 18 has a noble objective.

“But the bill will be condemned to failure unless the government tackles the reasons why young people drop out in the first place.

“For some young people, a curriculum based on the traditional timetable of academic subjects continues to be the best option. They respond well to learning by listening and reading.

“However, many young people are bored and uninspired by education pre-16. A third of young people drop out because they think it’s boring and irrelevant.”

Those who intend to stay in academic education post GCSE will clearly not be effected, so let’s focus on the early leavers.

Mr. Powell is wrong when he says ‘the bill will be condemned to failure unless the government tackles the reasons why young people drop out in the first place’. It is not simply a noble objective. Noble suggests lost cause, which this is not; it’s merely a suggestion to improve. He is right, however when he gives the reasons why they drop out: they think the education they’re provided with is boring and irrelevant. These two reasons are linked: What they’re taught at school might be more interesting if these early leavers didn’t think the topics irrelevant to themselves. This report, although exploring issues of sexual health and behaviour in early school leavers, finds that the majority of these early leavers come from a ‘working class’ background, and perhaps this is why they think of school as irrelevant: they think themselves below academic achievement and study and wonder how it will apply to a working life comprising of (they suppose) non-academic, practical tasks.

Perhaps this can be cured in some cases by showing academic learning’s relevance to each and every individual. Perhaps not.

If not, then the leaver has given school education a go, or at least experienced it. They then move on to their alternatives: employment, apprenticeships, or similar, the armed forces and, of course, doing sweet bugger all.

This is where the bill starts to make sense: by streamlining the leavers into either employment or apprenticeships or similar, they have, instead of the unstable grounding their disinterest or failings (or both) academic education has lovingly provided them with, groundings upon which to base their working life. This is of course assuming they treat these options with more seriousness than school.

The government doesn’t need to tackle ‘the reasons why young people drop out in the first place’ - young people hardly know who they are, let alone what they want to do at 16. School - what with it’s convenient freeness - gives young people a chance to work out these things for themselves. Instead it needs to pass this bill and give everyone a yet more equal chance to succeed and survive in this world.

The facts regarding the bill.

Getting hired by Google appears to be just about one of the most mentally taxing processes known to man:

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“Google gets over a million resumes annually.

A chosen few make it to one 45 minute phone interview. Fewer make it to several follow up skill accessment phone interviews.

Even fewer get invited for a several hour in person interview consisting of math brain teasers and skills testing. Everyone must sign an agreement restricting what they can reveal publically about their experiences.

The final few get to the point of an additional day of intense interviews and tests.

Finally, even most of those get rejected.

The extreme few who do get hired become apart of what Fortune magazine has selected as the numer one best company to work for in 2007 in their annual list of 100.”

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Actually a few have indeed revealed a few secrets of the interviewing process here, or in one case, although no specifics in terms of actual questions, the process in it’s entirety (More links here). Here’s a sample of some of the questions you may get asked (Other eleven here):

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1. How many golf balls can fit in a school bus?

2. You are shrunk to the height of a nickel and your mass is proportionally reduced so as to maintain your original density. You are then thrown into an empty glass blender. The blades will start moving in 60 seconds. What do you do?

3. How much should you charge to wash all the windows in Seattle?

4. How would you find out if a machine’s stack grows up or down in memory?

5. Explain a database in three sentences to your eight-year-old nephew.

6. How many times a day does a clock’s hands overlap?

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Of those questions I found that if I gave myself a minute or so’s thinking time I could answer (I say answer, I mean know how I might answer) around half. I dread to think what answering these questions might be like in the actual interview. Take for instance something like ‘How many piano tuners are there in the entire world?’ - I guess I’d answer this by theorising, and with basic mathermatics. So now we know how, let’s do:

Let’s say one in ten homes in MEDCs contain a piano (This is probably completely wrong, but that’s not what they’re looking for.

Let’s say one in a 0.5 million homes in LEDCs contain a piano.

Let’s say the population divide between MEDCs and LEDCs is around half, and that world population is at 6 billion.

To find out the number of pianos in MEDCs we divide 3 billion by ten: 300 million - 300, 000,000 pianos in MEDCs.

Do the same thing with LEDCs: 3 billion divided by 0.5 million: 6 thousand - 6000 pianos in LEDC’s.

So with 300,006,000 pianos worldwide, and a piano/piano tuner ratio of 1000/1, there must be 300,006 piano tuners in the world.

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My assumations are way off, my maths is probably wrong and I’m sitting at my computer. Doing this on the spot in front of ten highly intelligent, academic people would be no mean feat. Then again, the situation will stimulate some, but the feat would remain, er, ‘no mean’.

All in all it’s an interesting process, but I think for now I prefer the write charming letter/get accepted method they’ve got going at the bookshop where I do some work. Maybe after I’ve done that computer science degree.

BBC reports that a second climber has been killed this week on Helvellyn, Cumbria. This is after avalanche warnings last week declaring that ‘with up to half a metre of snow, freezing temperatures and gales, conditions at Helvellyn were the worst in 16 years’.

This will hopefully remind those who see themselves as invincible - I being as guilty as any (But that’ll never happen to me!) - that they aren’t. But probably not - when one sees hears of avalanche warnings in England does it not prompt in us as much interest as wariness?

Nevertheless, wariness conquers curiousity on this count, and I’ll be avoiding Helvellyn on the wintery walking weekend I have planned for February.

Our hearts of course go out to the families of both climbers.

This article is about a television series. For the act of escaping prison, see prison escape.

Prison Break Season 3 is due to slink sluggishly back on to our screens after it’s winter hibernation tomorrow (Well, our PC screens for those so desperate for it in the UK), despite the continuing writer’s strike.

I spent three tense and highly enjoyable weeks before Christmas glued to the TV after purchasing the boxsets of the first two seasons, but perhaps it’s a good thing I’ll only have one opportunity a week to sate my PB yearnings now - I might just have a chance of regaining that - wait - what? - ah yes! - social life.

For those that don’t know, StumbleUpon, according to a certain online encyclopedia, ‘is a web browser plugin that allows its users to discover and rate webpages, photos, videos, and news articles. These webpages are typically presented when the user — known within the community as a Stumbler — clicks the “Stumble!” button on the browser’s toolbar.’

It basically puts interesting, user-specific web content at the touch of a button.

Within ten stumbles today I’ve already turned up Readprint, a free online resource consisting of thousands of classical literature titles, Squashed Philosophers, a selection of condensed, abridged and entirely readable versions of some of the great philosophical works from Plato to Turing, An Essay By Einstein (The World As I See It), some wonderful photos by Nick Brandt, oncesentence.org, true stories told in one sentence, the 20 strangest guitars you’ll ever see, all you need to know and learn about critical thinking on the web, a picture of the Earth at night showing the proportion lit up by artificial light … the list would continue until I stopped clicking ‘Stumble!’. That’s 7/10 pages that interest me - probably seven things I would never have found and seen were it not for StumbleUpon.

To sign up, go to the sign-up page. After inputting your details, you’re asked first to install the plugin (Compatible with Firefox, most Firefox-based browsers and IE), then to select your interests from a wide range of options. Select say, 5, and then click the Stumble! button on the toolbar, and you’ll be presented with a page based on your interests. You then have the option to choose whether you like the page or not - if you don’t, StumbleUpon won’t show similar content again. If you do, it will. According to their site, the “Golden Rule” of ‘Stumbling!’ is: the more you do it, the better it gets! And of course, this makes sense.

StumbleUpon, you truly are the saviour of those who haven’t enough time/are too lazy/are too computer incompetent to get what they want out of the web, and a very useful plugin to everyone else.

I watched ‘Stay Alive‘ last night. It was one of those films that really made me wonder: Why do they bother making these things? It’s bizarre until you remind yourself that they get paid an arm and a leg more than all of us - I’d make a dire film like this for that money. But the director of this film has stage, and opportunity - surely what he’s been working towards most of his life. I’ve heard it takes either volunteering to be a director’s slave for free for a decade or a hell of a lot of cash.

So the guy wants this, he’s wanted it most of his life, he loves it as an art form. So why, with his stage and opportunity, does he waste that by making one of the worst films I’ve ever seen? I actually don’t think it’s a bad idea; reality and virtual reality are beginning to blur. Some people seem to be living online. Perhaps there’s room in the market for a Mac Pro/Life support system? You’d never have to move. But using these silly characters, bad storyline and truly awful actors is clearly not a good and interesting way to explore the idea. The writers talk about the film in an interview at DarkHorizons.com, and it answers my question as to why the story ever came in to being (The writers are game geeks), but not, apart from not so obvious financial reasons (You wouldn’t believe it had made $27 million worldwide), why it was actually funded and made. I say ‘apart from financial reasons’. This is clearly why the movie was made. I answer my own earlier question, but what pains me most is that people actually go and see these films. Of course we all have freedom of choice, but people chose to pay to see this and enjoy it?! This annoys me even more than Frankie Muniz’s existence. Two comforting thoughts:

Those who saw it may not have enjoyed it. In fact they probably didn’t.

Pirates of the Caribbean made $309,404,152 - Ha!

Stay away, warns Filmsy’s excellent review, and I quite agree.

There have been two or three false starts, stutters, enthusiasm present, but not in abundance, longing, desire … and now, finally, I have hosting and a domain. It has been a struggle, but I’m here.

I began by having a look at different hosting providers, and though TopHosts’ top 25 web hosting providers list, found ehosting. ehosting seemed like a good deal - I paid a small monthly amount and got what I needed to host a personal blog, as well as buying a domain name through them. But then I tried to install Movable Type (I had all this time been following a tutorial for blogging beginners at the excellent Tokyo Shoes site) - and I had problem after problem with it. Even when an expert from their forums tried to install it for me he came up with the same issue. Now I have no doubt MT is a wonderful tool to blog with, given the glowing reverence it’s given by it’s users, but I eventually decided to switch to another blogging platform. I chose Wordpress, and it’s been brilliant. I didn’t just switch blogging platforms though, I for some reason decided to switch to another hosting company, this time recommended by Wordpress. So I went for Bluehost, who have turned out fine so far. I was able to install Wordpress hassle free through their cPanel using a program called Fantastico (OK, it’s a ‘commercial script library’). It doesn’t just install Wordpress though, there’s a whole range of CMS’s (Content Management Systems) to choose from, including Geeklog and Joomla. I’m going to try a few out in the future.

I would definitely recommend a Bluehost/Wordpress combination for junior bloggers (Junebloggers?) It’s simple and efficient. When editing the templates, the CSS/XHTML learning curve is steep, but you’ll begin by tweaking and soon enough be building your own WP theme.

So here I am with everything set up (Except that damn header image - help!), and very happy indeed. I’ll hopefully be posting regularly.