But are some more equal than others?
Over three million people have watched episodes of “Lost,” “Desperate Housewives,” “Alias” and “Commander-in-Chief” on their computers since US television network ABC launched the service at the start of May.
Musings from Bill
But are some more equal than others?
Over three million people have watched episodes of “Lost,” “Desperate Housewives,” “Alias” and “Commander-in-Chief” on their computers since US television network ABC launched the service at the start of May.
[As usual, you can also read this on BBC News online]
The five of us bounced out of the restaurant at around ten, after a great meal, some beers and the usual arguments about preferred programming languages, the future of free and open source software and the merits of Terry Pratchett’s later works.
It was a warm night so we crossed the street to get something to cool us down – not ice cream, but the best kulfi in the Defence Colony, one of the hippest areas in downtown New Delhi.
One of the more unexpected things I found on my first trip to the sub-continent… thanks to Lisa for taking the pic.
Drawing crowds in the Old City
Monday was not quite the hottest day in Delhi so far, but 44 degrees Celsius made it the hottest May 8th for five years and, if the CNN weather maps are to be believed, made Delhi one of the hottest places on earth.
This may in part explain why, when Julian, Gareth and I stood at the closed gates to the Red Fort, the massive brick construction at the heart of the Old City built by the Moghul Emperor Shah Jahan, we attracted such a crowd. They were waiting to see which of us would faint or perhaps even die first in the heat that was extreme even for residents.
It’s seventeen degrees Celsius in my hotel room on the sixth floor of Shangri-La Hotel in New Delhi. The room is just starting to get warmer as I’ve turned off the air-conditioning, but it’s unlikely to approach the searing temperatures on the road outside, where yesterday’s peak of 44.5 was the highest in the city so far this year and prompted health advice from the local government.
If you need some hardware, this is the place to go…
I’m in Delhi, working on some programmes for Digital Planet, and I’ll write more about my first time in India later. But on saturday evening, seven hours after my plane touched down, I was lucky enough to be able to go along to a meeting of the Delhi Bloggers.
It was their eleventh meeting in the last two years, which is pretty impressive, and around thirty people showed up, which is more than normal. It would be nice to think they came because the fame of Digital Planet has spread to the Delhi blogosphere, but I suspect that wasn’t the case…
My good friend and long-time colleague Will Davies, originally at The Work Foundation and more recently at ippr, is inteviewed by John Sutherland in today’s Guardian, talking about the dangers of putting our faith so completely in technologies whose current primary purpose is to make the world ever more “flexible to the whims of consumers in egocentric and irrational ways.”
It’s an argument he’s been making for some time – as he points out in his usual self-deprecating fashion on his blog – but no less valid for that. I recall standing outside Demos one evening some time ago as we argued that text voting was making it all too damn easy for people and devalued the democratic process…
If you have a MasterCard-issued credit card then you may be hearing from your bank in the next few days.
The credit card company has revealed that that a potential security breach at a UK retailer means that cardholder details may have been leaked. MasterCard has told banks that issue their cards to take what they call ‘necessary steps to protect cardholders’, which may include reissuing cards with new numbers.
Every year Cambridge hosts a rather fine Folk Festival, sponsored in recent years by BBC Radio 2. And in recent years it has become rather popular, so as a result it is hard to get tickets. In response to this the City Council, which promotes the event, has decided to make it not just hard but positively unpleasant to buy tickets: they have no online booking, a phone line with one person on it [it seems], postal booking with no guarantee – and a box office that you can attend in person. Perhaps they believe that this will ensure that only dedicated folk fans and Cambridge residents will attend, thus preserving the purity of the event. Or perhaps they are just incompetent, stupid and contemptuous of those – like me – who pay their wages or vote them in.
Today I spent the day queuing, and like any working geek I had my laptop with me. I also had my camera.
Continue reading “Buying tickets for the Folk Festival”