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I watched a short documentary today showing a few examples of the brutality and freedom suppressing bullshit the Chinese communist regime routinely hands out to its own people.

The sight of weeping middle-aged women and frail old men desperately pressing their paper petitions into the hands of a helpless reporter was very moving. Many Chinese travel thousands of miles to Beiijing with these petitions, seeking redress for their grievances through the only officially sanctioned means available to them. Once they arrive, they are met with cold bureaucratic silence, imprisonment, or violence.

The institutionalised contempt of the Communist leadership is staggering, it is also depressingly normal behavior for this odious institution. The opinions of ordinary people mean nothing and it is illegal to organize any kind of opposition to wrongful treatment. No dissent (however mild), is tolerated. Active protest or resistance is simply crushed into silence. It’s a genuinely disgusting joke, but sadly, it’s one that our own corrupt governments are happy continuing to laugh along with.

Link.

Tags: Beiiing Corruption, China, Communism

First tamed by the Sumerians some 5000 years ago, Cheetahs are largely solitary creatures with a tendency to hunt alone. They were used as hunting partners during the reign of the Pharaohs and are famed for their great speed, reaching velocities of up to 70mph for short distances. When sprinting, the cheetah’s body temperature becomes so high, that were it to contine it would prove fatal for the animal.

The Cheetah is a very vocal animal, possessing an amazing ability to mimic the calls certain birds. This perhaps goes some way towards explaining its somewhat undeserved reputation for slyness.

The collective noun for a group of Cheetahs is a coalition, The Cheetahs current conservation status is vulnerable.

Tags: Cheetah

There are many reasons why I love JRR Tolkien. This particular quote provides another. On a day when I desperately require an early night, it is both a pleasure and a relief to to post it.

Take it away Mr. T!

“The true equation is ‘democracy’ = government by world financiers…The main mark of modern governments is that we do not know who governs, de facto any more than de jure. We see the politician and not his backer; still less the backer of the backer; or what is most important of all, the banker of the backer. Enthroned above all, in a manner without parallel in all past, is the veiled prophet of finance, swaying all men living by a sort of magic, and delivering oracles in a language not understanded [sic] of the people.”

J.R.R. Tolkien, Candour Magazine, 13 July 1956, p. 12

Tags: , Tolkien

At the invitation of Microsoft employee and fellow podcaster Pete Cogle, I traveled to Reading in December to visit the Microsoft Campus in Thames Valley.

I went to contribute to an internal broadcast panel discussion about the utility, value and methodology of podcasting. The panel events were part of an internal project organized by Microsoft employees, under the banner ‘Academy Mobile’. Also taking part were Dave Coplin, Pete Cogle, and Tony Cocks.

Tags: Microsoft, Mobile, Podcasting, Social Media, Video Cogle

As a young boy, it seemed to me that football was an almost magical sport. I spent thousands of hours kicking a ball against a wall, playing ‘Subuteo’ with my best friend and neighbor Rory Harrington, reading football comics and annuals and collecting stickers, or playing until late with my friends in the park. I consumed all the popular football stories of the age, with my favorite being ‘Billy’s Boots’ a weekly strip in the ‘Roy of the Rovers’ comic. It was the story of a schoolboy footballer, who suddenly develops amazing skills whenever he laces up the old boots of legendary striker ‘Dead Shot’ Keen.

I spent a long time trying to decide which team I wanted to support. All the kids at my school were Liverpool fans, which was hardly a surprise, since Liverpool FC were the dominant force in domestic football. They’d won back to back league championships and they’d won the European Cup twice. They had players like Kevin Keegan, John Toshack and Kenny Daglish and they were, (on any given Saturday) almost unbeatable. It was hardly surprising that most of the boys at my school were Liverpool fans.

For some reason, I couldn’t bring myself to join the crowd. Perhaps it was that two of the school’s biggest bullies were Liverpool fans; or that being part of the majority just didn’t suit my loner disposition. Whatever it was, I tried several unsuccessful alternatives, including a season as an Everton supporter and one as a Leeds United fan. Mostly, my interest in Leeds, was based around my admiration of their player Peter ‘Hot-shot’ Lorimar. I think it was his nickname that did it, reminiscent as it was of the Roy of the Rovers character ‘Hot-Shot Hamish’.

I vividly remember the moment I became a Manchester United supporter. It was during the summer of my thirteenth year, on a balmy Saturday afternoon, on May 12, 1979. The time was approximately 4: 40 p.m. I remember being riveted to the family television screen all that day - watching the build-up, the pre-match chat, the interviews and the teams arriving at the stadium in their FA Cup final suits. At the time, the FA Cup was one of only a handful of live matches televised during the entire domestic season. To a football mad 13 year old boy, raised on ‘Roy of the Rovers’ comics, it was a very big deal indeed.

The game had a special significance for me, because that morning I’d made a fiercely contested bet on its outcome with Rory. There was no money involved, merely pride and bragging rights for the winner when we met to relive the match in the park afterwards. But I’d staked my reputation as a sporting prognosticator on United winning the cup that year. Rory was unshakable in his conviction that Arsenal would triumph.

The match itself belonged to Arsenal, thanks to an early goal from midfielder Brian Talbot; a virtuoso performance from Irish winger Liam Brady and a 43rd minute strike from forward Frank Stapleton. Arsenal were 2-0 up at half-time. They outplayed United in the second half and seemed to be cruising towards an inevitable victory.

By the 86th minute, I was feeling pretty deflated. It was looking likely, that not only would Rory would be proved right, but that United would go down to an ignominious defeat. Then, United’s Scottish defender Gordon McQeen bundled home a scrappy goal from a free kick and two minutes later, winger Sammy Mcillroy performed a mazy dribble through the heart of the Arsenal defence, before slotting home an equalizer. I was jumping up and down shouting insanely, along with the Wembley crowd and the millions watching at home. For a moment, a sporting miracle seemed possible.

Sadly, man of the match Liam Brady had one more surging run left in him. In the 89th minute he took off down the left-hand side of the field and laid a diagonal ball on for winger Graham Rix. His perfectly measured cross found Alan Sunderland waiting at the far post and he stuck out a leg to slot home the winner - It was heartbreaking, It was pure sporting drama, it was football.

From that moment on, I knew that Manchester United were the team for me. I didn’t care that they’d lost. I didn’t mind when Rory taunted me afterwards. I had to wait until 1983 to see them win the FA Cup, beating Brighton and Hove Albion 4-0 in a replay, after the first game had finished in a 2-2 draw. They won it again in 1985, beating Everton FC 1-0. I was ecstatic that day. Little did I know how many wonderful winning moments were to come.

This weekend, Manchester United play Manchester City at Old Trafford, in a game designed to honor the 40th anniversary of the Munich air disaster. This took place on 6 February 1958, when British European Airways Flight 609 crashed on its third attempt to take off from a snow and slush filled runway at the Munich Riem airport. 23 people died in that crash, amongst them eight Manchester United players and three members of the coaching staff. It was an event that stunned a nation. The ‘Busby Babes’ as the young team were nicknamed, had represented a young and immensely gifted generation of Manchester United players. Their untimely demise had an incalculable effect on the future history of the club, doing much to shape the philosophy and ethos behind it.

Today, Manchester United continue a tradition of playing swashbuckling, attractive and attacking football, nurturing young talent and thrilling an estimated fanbase of 330 million people worldwide. The successive generations of teams built by the current manager Sir Alex Ferguson over his 21 year tenure, are a tribute to and continuation of a tradition begun in the era of Sir Matt Busby and the ‘Busby babes’. They are a fitting monument to the memory of those who died on that tragic day. This weekend, when the current young team step out onto the pitch at Old Trafford they will be wearing a replica 1958 kit bereft of corporate logos and they will be evoking the memory of an era lost, carrying the flame of a powerful tradition.

The romance, passion, flair and the sheer Joie de vivre that Manchester United exude both on and off the field, has made them arguably the biggest football club on earth. Much of that passion grew out of a terrible tragedy. One that has been both honored and answered by those who followed after Munich. To me, as a simple Manchester United fan, they have given immense pleasure, many wonderful moments and a sense of happiness and enjoyment that continues to this day. In some small way, my love of Manchester United, helps to keep a magical spirit alive. A spirit of optimism and memory, that I first felt as a young boy kicking a ball against a wall 30 years ago.

Tags: FACup Childhood Munich, Football, Manchester, MUFC

I’ve owned a Nokia N95 8GB for a couple of months now. During that time its spent an entirely disproportionate number of hours in my hands compared to any other phone I’ve owned. Indeed, I’ve found it to be SO useful, that I often only put it down when I need to recharge it, or to go to sleep!

As smartphones go it’s been compared to a Swiss Army knife, because it’s extremely versatile, does a number of useful things pretty well and can be used to open canned food goods in a tight spot. (Joking about that last one!) I’ve found myself using it to do numerous things that I previously relied upon a combination of devices for.

The 5mpx camera easily got me through a hectic family Christmas, taking plenty of pictures and shooting some nice videos of my two young nephews. Interestingly, they both loved the fact they were able to instantly view and hear the footage I’d just taken on the 240×320 pixel screen. We had some fun with that! The phone takes excellent pictures and whilst it’s not a professional camera, the quality was impressive enough for my 75 year old Dad to request some prints. I dutifully provided these by bluetoothing the files to a machine at a local photo place and printing them out. Easy.

Even though I’d taken my Macbookpro with me on the trip home, I barely used it. This was a good thing, as network access was pretty intermittent at my Dad’s. It was reassuring (to a web-junkie like myself) that I could hop onto the web using Wap whenever I needed to, or scan for a wireless hotspot whenever I was in town.

My favourite application right now has got to be emTube, written by Sebastian Jedruszkiewicz. Unlike the YouTube application bundled with the N95, it actually DOES provide full access to the entire YouTube library. It’s a doddle to use and allows you to download Flash video content directly onto the phone. The N95 supports video-out to a television, (via an included cable) so it’s great to be able to plug it directly into a tv and show your videos to family and friends.

I also really enjoy using Nokia’s Internet Radio application. It gives me fast, clean access to a host of streamed music and talk stations, over a pretty wide range of genres. Another excellent, well designed interface too, with some really nice graphical touches. I particularly like the fact that you can search by keyword and that it fades down the previous stations volume when you select the next one.

‘Twibble’ is another funky little application. It has entirely solved my mobile twitter needs. As well as allowing me to post and view tweets and to send direct-messages to my friends. It can also make use of the N95’s built-in GPS to add your current position to a tweet. I tend not to use this function much though as I’m not always overly keen on broadcasting my current location to the world!

The best mobile browsing experience I’ve found so far has to be ‘Opera’. It looks great on the N95 and wraps the text really well making everything easy to read and navigate. It seems to be faster and more intuitive than any of the other mobile browsers I’ve tried. It’s not free to use though, but it does have a 30 day free-trial that you can download. It costs around £13:00 to register it, which is a little steep. These days people are used to getting their browsers for nothing. Still it’s a great product and if you don’t fancy stumping up the cash, there’s a free mini-version of the application available here.

I’m a big fan of the PDF format for e-books. I love the fact that I can read them on my N95. Its something I’ve been wanting on my phone for years. My N95 came with version 1.5 of Adobe’s PDF Reader pre-installed. Annoyingly though, it didn’t magnify and reflow the text in such a way that reading a long book was viable. So, I stumped up the cash for the latest version (2.5) which does do this and does it pretty well. The text is far easier to view and the program allows me to set zoom and reflow options so that even complex documents become perfectly readable. Its not an ideal solution but if you like the idea of carrying a library on your mobile phone, it will enable you to access all your favorite e-books quickly, without needing an extremely large bag, full of heavy paper tomes!

I also like being able to use the camera in stealth mode sometimes. This can be a little difficult to achieve under normal circumstances. A shutter noise going off tends to alert everybody within hearing distance and attracts quite a bit of unwelcome staring! I’ve found a workable solution to this in the freeware utility cCam. It doesn’t do anything except mute the shutter sound, take the picture and save it to memory. It also defaults to a 5mpx image which is not adjustable. On the plus side, it’s free! If you decide you’d like to take a stealthy photograph every now and then and don’t want people staring at you it’ll prove invaluable!

My only complaints with the N95 are that my mobile provider (Vodafone) has crippled certain aspects of the phones functionality. Most notably the VOIP capability and the ability to upgrade the firmware without voiding the warranty. This is not ideal but (for now at least) I’ll live with the annoyance. I know it’s possible to remove this by debranding the phone but I’m not quite ready to do so yet. Another small issue, is that I tend to have to recharge the phone pretty frequently, although that’s a result of the fact that I spend so much time using it!

Regardless of these minor quibbles, in the few short months I’ve owned an N95 it’s become an indispensable part of my digital life. I wouldn’t say that I couldn’t live without it, because I don’t like to give any technology that much power over my life. But, if I lost it, I’d replace it in a heartbeat. It’s a great phone and its a lot of fun to use. All I want now, is the functionality to enable me to post video messages to Seesmic!

Tags: , 8Gb, emtube, Mobile, N95, Nokia, Twibble

Sometimes, I struggle to see the point in any of my social-media activities. They often make me feel like an outsider. My participation seems to confirm my apparent inability to maintain a consistent light-hearted and sunny disposition. To ‘fit-in’ with the general tone of what’s occurring around me in the various online forums or hangouts populated by the shiny web 2.0 people.

I have all the external accouterments of belonging to this community. Several blogs; a large back catalog of podcast recordings hosted on various sites; Twitter/Facebook/Jaiku accounts; membership of a multitude of other services; Second Life, WOW and Seesmic amongst them. I’m pretty ‘engaged’ as far as the social media ‘conversation’ goes. I even spent an enormous chunk of time last year organising a PodcampUK event in Birmingham. I thought it would help me overcome my sense of isolation, rid me of this uncomfortable feeling of aloneness I often feel. Sadly it didn’t.

I’ve come away from a storm of activity feeling as unsatisfied and empty as ever. Less connected, not more so. Despite the good moments and the good people. There are times when I feel I’ve found the answer and I can submerge myself in the general flow of communal goodwill. On those occasions, (just for a moment, an hour, a day), I do feel part of a group. I belong. Theses feelings always fade quickly and I return to feeling like an oddball. With my political preoccupations, my endless hours of reading and research, my hard-headed attempts to dig under the belly of the beast simply isolating me from everyone else.

Most people don’t feel the need to engage themselves in some deep or meaningful search for the truth. They don’t care (that much) about the implications of the Lisbon Treaty, who killed Anna Politkovskya, the creeping surveillance state, what peace protester Brian Haw has to say about the state of our civil liberties, who is really pulling the political and psychological strings upon which or reality hangs, or much else of that ilk. They simply want to relax at the end of the working day, indulge in some digital distractions, chat to friends, watch tv, go shopping online, or rest.

I don’t know why that’s not me. Why I often can’t fit in and why (despite the restless pain) I don’t even want to. As I begin a new-year, I can only hope that (for the first time in a long while) better times and answers to these questions lie ahead.

  I’m currently back in Weston-Super-Mare at my family home. I’ll be staying for the next few weeks, as my family attempts to come to terms with my dear Mum’s passing in the early hours of Tuesday morning, July 31st.

A strange atmosphere of unreality is pervading the house. It feels as if my Mum is still close by. As if she’s resting in an adjacent room; or at work on the hospital switchboard where she spent so much of every day for over nineteen years. Anywhere in fact, except beyond our reach or out of contact for the rest of our earthly lives.

Her things are everywhere. Objects which, until a few short hours ago, she was very much attached to and in contact with. Her clothes, jewelry, books, keepsakes and everyday objects. They all seem oddly forlorn and bereft of purpose now.

I’m due to view her body in the hospital chapel in a few hours. I feel apprehensive and anxious about it. I wonder whether the visible lack of life in her form and my direct contact with that reality, will shake off the effects of this emotional and psychic stupor. It has been clinging like an unwelcome winter frost to me in these recent hours.

None of this feel real. I don’t. I feel light and insubstantial, my expressions of support for my dad and family less consequential and comforting than I imagined they would be when I raced down here. Reality seems to seep out for brief seconds at time. I catch it staring at me, in a sharp expression of pain passing like a dark shadow across my fathers face. I read it in the words printed upon her death certificate, collected this morning. I sense it in the silence of a room my mum once filled with her laughter and cheerful chatter. But it vanishes again moments later.

With it’s passing, the sense of unreality returns, bringing with it that strange uncertain feeling. Nagging doubts about the future, the sense that she hasn’t really gone, that she’ll be coming through the front door directly, smartly dressed, smiling and happy, like she always did so many times before.

It’s not easy to accept the future right now. Because whatever it brings, nothing will ever be the same in my family again. A lynch-pin has been removed, a strong and certain force for it’s good has left us, a source of its hope and purpose has gone, never to be replaced.

God bless you Mum, you were the best of us.

Tags: Personal

Today is a bad day. Filled with grim news, ill tidings and a sense of destructive fatality. The latest phone bulletin from my Dad, has brought home the gravity of my Mum’s condition with a fresh intensity.

Cancer really is a pig of an illness - brutal, unrelenting and difficult to comprehend. My Mum’s deterioration continues and demonstrates with unmistakable clarity the limits of known human medical achievement. For me, it reinforces our inability to truly understand the metaphysical complexities of existence; to answer the really big questions. Such as why life is such a strange hybrid of joy and pain and why, for all our  apparent “wisdom” do we as human beings remain apparently helpless before the realities and frailties of our condition?

The orthodoxy of this current age, inculcates a belief  that life is essentially the result of a meaningless cosmic accident. One where inanimate non-living matter somehow developed a living quality. A process known as a-biogenesis. If this hypotheses is true, then all existence; everything we feel and know, is merely the result of an initial “accident”. My Mum’s current suffering has no deeper explanation, beyond a deterioration of the host material shell and the oncoming destruction of the sentient form contained within it. It’s simply another roll of a giant cosmic numbering sequence. Blind and unfeeling and essentially, on a deeper metaphysical level, meaningless.

Why then do we bother to dignify it with false explanations and pointless attempts to explain the inexplicable? Why do so many of us search for meaning when there is none? After all, you can’t explain or justify a process that essentially has no meaning - beyond that explained in the simple everyday cliche of “shit happens!”

I don’t buy it though, I never will. It doesn’t resonate with me, it doesn’t “feel” right. On the simple level of instinct it doesn’t sit comfortably within me.The meaningless and infinitely complex jumble of electro-chemical impulses constituting my consciousness, finds such explanations difficult to accept and irrational to believe in. Something deep within me rebels and it it isn’t just dumb fear. All these millennia of  “evolution” and yet it still produces a creature still so apparently backward in his thinking, so far from accepting what should be an obvious reality - how on earth does that make sense?

Despite the multiplicity of forms in the world, the apparent complexity and diversity of interactions, experiences and organisms arising from this initial “accident” the evolutionary imperative has failed to create a convert from it’s own materia.  How very deeply strange. Is it then, even remotely possible that the reason for this, is simply because those “facts” presenting themselves as the definitive truth, are merely another hypotheses in search of legitimizing evidence?