Books

You know that moment of social interaction while waiting for the kettle to boil, because you know it is going to boil by the time you get back to your chair and actually re-enter your password to unlock the pc. Yesterday morning I felt particularly opinionated after being squashed into an overfull tube and to top it of having been hit over the head by a kindle. Off topic - if Boris thinks his tubes are fine I really would like to invite him on the Victoria Line between 8 and 9 in the morning. So you can guess my mood when I unleashed my prepared speech onto the first unsuspecting colleague who came in looking for a cuppa.

As a predator ready for the kill, I saw him look at the kettle filled to the maximum not making any sounds of reaching boiling point yet and then the most wonderful invitation to a chat sounded 'So how are you?'. Muhaha how am I, how am I, I will tell you how I am - is what sounded in my head as I started to tell him my opinion on kindles.

Yes, kindles, e book readers and other electronic devices posing as a replacement for a book. How can you possibly say one of them toys can replace a book? I gave him all my arguments. How was I to know that I encountered my nemesis a true e book lover...

So I started saying that it just isn't the same, you don't know how far along you are in a book. He proved me wrong, you have little icons showing you how far along you are in a book in some readers.

Startled but not beaten I stated that you miss a big part of joy when you line up a trilogy on a book shelf. He countered that in his tiny Londen flat books were mostly kept under the bed, in boxes at his parents and no where near a book shelf.

After a few more waved away points I thought I had him, and revealed my secret weapon the smell of a new book! Now admit it, there is nothing like that lovely smell of opening a fresh book. Breaking the binding and sniffing the pages is like smelling a waft a perfume that takes you back to a lovely holiday or a steamy hot date with a handsome man. It recounts all those wonderful adventures you shared with Drizzt, Scarlet, Fitz, Frodo and so many more. He looked defeated, there was no winning this one. That was until a few hours later I get this link sent to me in my mailbox, http://smellofbooks.com/ ...

Yes, some person had this kettle argument before and ended up thinking, I will get that e book reader hater! And bottled the scent of that sacred pleasure that every book lover cherishes, the plucking of a books cherry. To add to the audacity of bottle new book smell they also have old book smell and bacon smell! You read it right bacon smell described in the following poetic words:
'Crunchy Bacon is a low calorie, low cholesterol alternative for your breakfast reading enjoyment. '
I don't know about you but I dont really end up eating the pages I read on my morning commute.

But there went my last bit of defence I had to hold on to the old fashioned medium called books. However the day went on and I decided to be the old fashioned book user while the world would convert to e readers. I imagined myself printing an e book and having it bound at the printers. This morning I passed mr e reader on the stairs and just as the warm sun hit my back he spoke these words: 'You forgot to mention that you can never run out of battery with a normal book' while shaking his kindle at me. The smile that appeared on my face that blissful moment has not left my lips all day. How could I not see the flaw, me whose phone is always dead and never knows her own number when someone asks for it, me whose laptop dies in the middle of the most exciting episode of V ever, me who has turned back from running multiple times when her iPod didn't have the energy I was so willing to waste away on a run.

Books always work, they don't need charging or plugging in or expensive batteries! They love you without needing anything in return, nothing but a shred of imagination and a hint of curiousity.

The smelly truth...

Living in the UK I must say I have watched more TV adverts than ever before in my life, and somehow I pay more attention to them. Is it because they are in a foreign language or just because a lot of the products are new and different? I don't know, however what did really popped out at me was this...

All these adverts show you products that we all seem to need, desperately need! Just think about it and their explanation makes sense. Yes, you will think that is the whole point of an advert! There is however a funny cycle of needs going on of late. Let me explain with an example.

Air fresheners

Advert 1: Oh look we have this fabulous air freshener you can place anywhere and it will make your house smell like summer time!

Initial reaction is 'oh yeah great idea!', I can put this nice looking think anywhere and press it when I want to freshen up this space.

A couple of weeks later this thing is standing on your dresser, collecting dust... And low and behold in the commercial break during the 3400th Friends episode, there is a new smelly stuff advert.

Advert 2: Look at this, no longer any need to press this beautiful air freshener it goes 'PFouwT' every 12,5 minutes giving you the exact freshness you will need to impress all your friends!

Initial idea, 'nice! Lets face it mine is standing there but I always forget too press it and the initial freshness is like sitting next to uncle Lou who likes to shower in his eau de toilette'

And yes your next trip to Tescos you can't resist this new and improved freshness bringer. The following weeks your trips to Tescos contain more than usual air freshener refills and batteries... to the point where you give up and it just stands there as another ornament on your dresser (Good thing it looks like a pretty rock!).

As if the air freshener people felt the drop in refill sales, there it is the new advert in another awesome lipping episode of Glee (I don't know why I watch it I don't even like it but it always ends up on the telly in our flat...).

Advert 3: Now plug your favourite air freshener in a plug socket, forget about batteries! Every now and then if will fill the air with a flower smell that will make a bee dizzy!

Oh my, now there is a solution to my battery problem! So yes again I was completely convinced this was what I needed... And this thing ends up in the hallway plug.

After running into it a few times, cursing myself a few times after finding our I didn't turn the power on on the plug socket I only noticed only a flower smell when tying my shoe laces. It was still spraying like a macho male cat and going through refills way too fast. So again I go back to my trusty smelly candles to give the house a nice atmosphere and smell. While dozing off to an episode of Chuck, there they were again my air fresheners desire demons.

Advert 4: The new and improved plug in air freshener from XXXX, no longer going through refills by spraying when you are not in. Control it yourself and make your house smell nice whenever you want it to smell nice!

And that's when I noticed it... wait a minute! That is the exact air freshener I had before I started this whole fragrant dance! So every few months, this whole cycle starts over again -> old becomes new -> bad becomes better...

After my epiphany I started to look at adverts differently and this same cycle happens for shampoo (all in one, separate shampoo and conditioner, for all hair types, for just one hair type), face crème (day-night, combined, one skin type, all skin types, ...),...

Are we becoming this saturated with ideas that there is no room for new ones? Have we come where innovation becomes reinvention of old ideas? It is a scary idea but is this what the future will bring... I wonder while relaxing in my sofa with my lavender candle casting a comforting glow over the living room and the scent of the Provence filling my nose.

I am just taking a guess here, but I am pretty sure I am not the only one who is not the biggest fan of mondays. Don't get me wrong I absolutely love my job, I just love my weekends more! And somehow I never catch up on all the sleep I plan on catching up. But since I am a firm believer in the motto: 'When life gives you lemons better make lemonade', I try to smile my way through even the worst monday.

So this morning I had to be creative to get that smile back on my face, but I managed it by means of music. Many essays have been written on the effect of music on moods, although I don't think you need much research to admit that following song can make even the most grumpy monday-sucks mood disappear.

And there is even more good news, this young lady has a whole album filled with songs that will make you whistle away that manic monday. Not only covers of existing songs like this one but also all fresh and new songs to make your heart jump. This might look like outright advertising but somehow I felt the need to share this music with the world and I really hope you will find Lady Linn's album 'Here we go again' just as delightful as I did.

Oh and well arriving in work and finding a buffet of miniature croissants, chocolate breads and chocolate mousse pie did make this monday a bit more bearable...(still would have preferred staying in bed all day though ;) )

Expect a bit more robust post about my friday-the-weekend-is-near music really soon!

Have a good monday all and hope you enjoyed this little piece of music if you listened to it.

The end of console gaming?

My daily Reddit browsing session led me to this article stating the end of game consoles like Wii, Xbox and PS3 is near.

It gets my back up when I hear people raving about the idea to do everything online and remote. It makes me wonder if any of these people actually ever tried any online gaming. As a wowcrack (world of warcraft) addict I only depend for a small part of the game content on the web and still I hear a lot of complaining and nagging about latency, slowness in loading of other characters in the realm, uptime of the servers, instance servers being full and queues of people using servers. And this for a game that has the main stress of processing still on your own pc. This is not the only example even players on the current consoles like xbox and PS3 are complaining about latency in online multi-player games. Imagine depending on one of these shared servers to remotely power your game, it will give you the advantage of not needing a state of the art pc but you will need one hell of a broadband line. "We were a little suspicious of OnLive's capability to deliver perceptually lag-free on-demand games. But then we played a hasty online game of Crysis Wars on the service and became a little less suspicious. It seemed to work." was a remark of one of the critics, my suggestion is try that again at home with a few more million users using the servers. When playing beta's of mmorpg's I've never had the smallest bit of lag ... but do the same things you did in the beta's on the first release day of the same game and chances are real that you end up smashing your keyboard on the desk in frustration because what you see and what you do is more out of sync than a pair of chimps trying out for synchronous swimming.

Call me a non-believer ...

It's Ada Lovelace Day!

I can hear from a far a load of people going.. Ada who?

Well, that asks for a little history lesson, I am not going to type it all out when you have the wonderful wikipedia that can tell more about this fascinating lady. Ada Lovelace in short was the first female programmer, this in the 19th century when she created a theoretical program that would give you the a sequence of Bernoulli numbers.

So today we remember her and want to shine an extra spotlight on women in technology. Being a programmer myself I had a hard time choosing one of the many fantastic examples out there. But a few weeks ago a colleague posted a link on our company Yammer and it caused that feeling that you get as a little girl when you know when you know what you wanna be when you grow up. Well when I grow up I want to be like Pattie Maes!

For the people not knowing Pattie Maes, she is a belgian lady who is currently an associate professor at MIT's program in Media Arts and Sciences.

Apart from that awesome job title Pattie Maes was the key architect behind what was once called "collaborative filtering" and has become a key to Web 2.0: the immense engine of recommendations fueled by other users. In the 1990s, Maes' Software Agents program at MIT created Firefly, a technology (and then a startup) that let users choose songs they liked, and find similar songs they’d never heard of, by taking cues from others with similar taste. This brought a sea change in the way we interact with software, with culture and with one another.

The movie clip that introduced this remarkable lady to me, you can find here.

It shows Patty demoing a new way in which humans and computers interact, partially by redefining both human and computer. In Maes' world (and really, in all of ours), the computer is no longer a distinct object, but a source of intelligence that’s embedded in our environment. By outfitting ourselves with digital accessories, we can continually learn from (and teach) our surroundings. This can vary from product information while shopping, to taking pictures and all this information visualised on any surface!

I was gobsmacked by the advanced state of the technology demoed and can see the world changing with the actual introduction of it. The possibilities are too many to think up in a few days.

So on this Ada Lovelace Day I would like to share with the world my own personal Ada being Pattie Maes. Keep up the good work and thanks for reminding me that with hard work even a woman from a country as little as Belgium can make that big an impact on the world!

TIC - an imminent threat

Compelled by the number of victims of a yet to be officially recognized health risk I want to warn you all for TIC or in full "Traumatic Intellectual Coma".

What is TIC?

TIC is caused by the repeated digestion of bullshit, malarkey, nonsense, idiocy in either verbal or written form. Both the amount of exposure and the grade of idiocy can induce mild to severe forms of TIC.

A TIC sufferer will go through following phases:

• denial: This just can't be true.
• anger: How is it possible!
• doubt: I must have misunderstood this or just read it wrong.
• depression: Is this really the kind of world we are living in !?
• acceptance: I can't change it so let's just not think about it anymore.

All 5 phases will be present in a mild to normal case of TIC. However in more severe cases a 6th phase can appear, this is where the TIC gains its power to spread its mind numbing grip on the worlds population. In the dreaded phase 6 the patient will take the ludicrous information and accept it as a truth. Convinced he has discovered something, he will want to share his fellow men and hereby spread the TIC causing bit of nonsensical information. Once in phase 6 an individual might become immune to TIC causing information and skip straight to the spreading phase.

I am sad to report that the only way to prevent lasting brain damage caused by TIC is keep getting annoyed by the amounts of bull you can find in the world. Please keep vigilant and remain a skeptic when it comes to hard to believe stories you read all over the place.

A TIC Case Study

I can present you with the case that made me realize the existence of this horrible condition.

Unaware of any danger I was reading my new version of my monthly magazine called "Electronics and Embedded Systems", when, in between articles called "a chip-scaled atomic clock", "broadband sampling oscilloscope" and "MED's views on multiprocessor-ASIC", I found an article that induced my eye-opening TIC experience:

!! Beware, reading the following article might induce TIC. Read further at own risk !!

Forget implants: the breast enlarging ringtone

So Hideto Tomabechi, one of the guys who helped deprogram members of the Aum Shinrikyo cult in Japan, has started selling a ringtone that will make your breasts grow larger just by listening to it, something which should make it very popular with the ladies . Fortunately there are customer testimonials in case you were worried about this thing being legit or not, and Tomabechi says it's really simple, that he just uses sounds that "make the brain and body move unconsciously. It's a technique involving subliminal effects," that's like "positive brainwashing." If getting all busty through a ringtone isn't your bag, he also ringtones on the way that'll improve your memory, make you more attractive to the opposite sex, cure baldness, and help you give up smoking.

Reading this article and the customer testimonials made me rush through a quick succession of TIC phases.

I hope this little blog post will make you too recognize TIC when you witness it first hand and share this knowledge with the world. Awaken your friends and family that start spreading TIC information so information spreading through various media will not have a global dumbing down effect.

The time has come to...

Push the button? In a way yes, push the buttons. I decided today that I am going to commit myself to a new life as blogger. What to expect on this blog? I hope to be a source of 'aaah's , 'oooh's, some 'haha' and lol's too. A mix of things that I find worth telling the world about and stuff I just don't ever want to forget.

Why now? I only have one answer to that and that is why not?

I hope you will find this blog as entertaining to read as it is for me to write.