So say we all!

[This should be up on the BBC News website soon]

There is a famous and hilarious episode of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads, the BBC sitcom from the 1970’s, in which our eponymous Geordies, Bob and Terry, spend an anxious day trying to avoid hearing the result of a crucial football match because they will be watching it later that night on Match of the Day.

It was one of my mum’s favourites, partly I suspect because she came from Hebburn and had grown up among men who resembled the Likely Lads in many ways, my dad among them.

Despite many mishaps and near-misses all goes well until just before they are about to settle down in front of the TV, but the ending is both funnier and less predictable than you might expect, as it usually was in this fine old British comedy, so I won’t give it away here.

I thought of Terry and Bob this weekend, since I found myself avoiding Facebook and other social network sites, refraining from reading much email and staying far away from any of the many manifestations of Twitter for fear that someone would give me even the smallest hint of the denouement of Battlestar Galactica, which has just come to an end after seventy-three episodes and numerous webisodes and extras.

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Cloud City

[As ever, you can read this on the BBC News website]

When I’m asked to give a talk about technology I like to pull out my iPod Touch, wave it at the crowd and point out that ‘in the future’ it will be a supercomputer with parallel processors and terabytes of storage.

Well, it seems the future has arrived rather earlier than I imagined, as a new service called ‘Oosah’ has just started offering a terabyte of storage for the iPhone/Touch ‘in the palm of your hand’.

On closer investigation it seems that they aren’t ripping the case apart to install some cool new quantum-effect anti-matter memory that has just emerged from the labs, which is a shame.

Instead they have a website that gives your phone access to remote data when you’re on the move and lets you copy files back and forward.  As long as you’ve got a signal or a wireless connection you’ll be able to play music, watch photos and read documents as if they were local.

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My del.icio.us bookmarks for July 23rd through July 30th

Here’s what I tagged on del.icio.us between July 23rd and July 30th:

I saw this…

Here’s what I’ve tagged on del.icio.us on %date%:

My del.icio.us bookmarks for July 1st through July 4th

Here’s what I tagged on del.icio.us between July 1st and July 4th:

My del.icio.us bookmarks for June 16th through June 23rd

Here’s what I tagged on del.icio.us between June 16th and June 23rd:

Storm warning for cloud computing: more like a miasma

[As ever, you can read this on the BBC News website, and Nick Carr has an excellent piece on ‘miasma computing‘ that moves the argument on nicely.]

My friend Simon is one of those net entrepreneurs with the attention to detail it takes to have an idea and turn it into an effective company. He’s currently on his second job search service, and it seems to be going very well.

One reason for the success may be that Simon has embraced the network age with a dedication that most of us can only wonder at. He uses a range of productivity tools, scheduling services and collaborative systems to manage both his personal and professional life, and once confessed to me that he had ‘outsourced his memory’ to Microsoft Outlook and its calendar service.

So far I’ve resisted the temptation to pay a team of hackers to break into his laptop and add ‘jump off a cliff’ as his 10am appointment on Thursday.

Recently I’ve noticed that Simon’s head is in the cloud. Or rather, his business is, as he and his team have moved most of their systems online, taking advantage of the move from local storage and processing to ‘cloud computing’, where data and services are provided online and accessed from a PC or any other device.

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