Lets not lose sight of the reason why these public spirited workers are taking action, they are being asked to "work the hours they are paid for".

Commentor Guardian Website

The end of an era is finally here, Labour tried to Privatise the Royal Mail and failed because of Union opposition. Now out of greed and short sightedness the very same union are painting themselves into a corner the business will never recover from.

Amazon, Argos & eBay, The life blood of what is left of the Royal Mail are setting up to drop them like a stone on the back of any industrial action. Small businesses are up in arms and there is even a petition.

We are fighting for fairness and job security...

Well fairness is about as broad as it is long, so you can justify just about anything there. I was forced to wear the company uniform and walk around posting things through doors - it's just unfair. Jobs at the Royal Mail are now about as secure as the crew on the Mary Celeste, they were more secure before the CWU started bleating about unfair conditions and rushed modernisation.

The unions seem not to realise that if the modernisation isn't pushed through quickly enough (whether or not it is the correct course of action) there will be little of the business to save. Being that it currently continues to be in business, due to being owned by the government and heavily subsidised by the tax payer.

The Royal Mail is a business it isn't there for the social benefit of its workers. If a business makes insufficient money to make payroll well sadly some workers have to go. If there is duplication of workers duties well thats wasted money, either re-train or move on.

There is only one thing left to say - The Royal Mail is Doomed! Not because of the business itself even if the letters being shipped via the royal mail decline 10% each year. No, it will fail because once again the Unions put the big foot in the mix. Lions leading Lambs anyone?

PS: I really wish I was a stakeholder in any alternative shipping company, its going to be a bumper christmas.

My first exposure to a computer was a windows 3.1 machine in 1995, it was god awful but I was only five and young kids and technology don't really get on. It was a good few years before I got a computer of my own, I ended up with a Pentium 1 MX running Windows 95, which didn't last long. I couldn't play any games on it, and it was stable as a long pole with a plate on it. So inevetably it was upgraded to a machine running Windows 98 Pentium 2, with a decent graphics card and MPEG decoder card.

Its probably at that point that the bug really caught me, from then on in I had a slew of applications and experiments going on the poor computer, which I still have under my desk. Three computers later and I made the big switch to Mac, something which I haven't regretted, and still manage to keep up with windows excluding Vista which is almost as bad as 3.1. I also managed to pick up Ruby on Rails and a bit of PHP along the way, and ashamed as I am to say it Visual Basic.

People always ask me how I know how computers work. The simple answer is I have been tinkering with them for far too long. Every computer I have owned has been broken replaced upgraded and attacked by me, leading me to come across practically every common error you can get. Its sad to say but I can usually diagnose a hardware fault before the BIOS has finished its self test at boot up, and a software problem by hitting less then 10 commands.

The trend over the last few years is people are using technology every waking moment, but very few know how the stuff works. I love knowing how it works, and couldn't really care less about using it. I will strip things down take them to bits, rebuild them, and then maybe use them. Because of this I have a collection of gadgets and gizmos that few other people my age can boast. It also means, that college work can sometimes come a distant second to a new gadget or blog post.

I don't procrastinate as such, I just love technology to distraction. Wait a minute that is technically procrastinating. I don't know what career I may choose, convergent technologies mean that practically any field is open to me.

Best bit is I know there will never be a boring job, technology is getting more and more exciting the closer we get to the point on the curve we drop off.  

I don't really know hoe I ended up collecting soundtracks, but two moments that really standout are; tracking down a piece of music used the in 2004 BAFTAs and another piece of music featured in the South Bank Show.

The music from the BAFTAs was probably the easiest to track down, I just emailed them. It took a couple of weeks but they emailed me back answer: Whisper of a Thrill - From Meet Joe Black - Thomas Newman. Within seconds the CD was bought and on its way. Its OK if you can email the people responsible and get them to tell you the music used but in the case of my second hunt, the emailing method wasn't so fruitful.

After watching the South Bank Show, I had the I must have that music moment and started on my merry way trying to track it down by google to no avail, I had some idea of who the composer could be Craig Armstrong or Thomas Newman, so I loaded the ITV website and sent them an email. I have found since then both ITV and the BBC hate these inquiries and just brush them off, Channel 5 usually give a better response. I got the typical response, "Due to the nature of the way we create our programming there is no record of the music for each program." I spent another few months searching, and had all but given up hope on finding the elusive piece of music, when i chanced upon a newly upload Craig Armstrong Album on iTunes. I had found it. Finding Beauty - Craig Armstrong within a couple of seconds it was downloaded.

I am sure that there isn't just me who has these little quests, I am also sure that many people unlike me will give up on finding the song they were looking for. I wish the BBC and ITV would setup websites that listed all the music from each program. I think music companies should be actively encouraging the publishing of music in film and TV, it would earn them some points and make some money.

Since my first encounter with the wonderful world of soundtracks my library has grown from a mere 5 hours to over 22 days (thats528 hours) So much so I now have so much music that the chances are that I hear a piece of music in a film or TV program, I will already have a copy in there somewhere.

The problem is finding it.

In biology, evolution is the process of change in the inherited traits of a population of organisms from one generation to the next - wikipedia

So I thought I would get back to my favorite subject apart weird jokes about people I know. Thats right some more Artilect goodness.

As part of my biology course we are ofcourse studying Darwinian Natural Selection (intelligent design people stop reading here) which is all well and good, but does it still hold true for our evolution now.

At its basic level Natural Selection states that:

Natural selection is the process by which favorable heritable traits become more common in successive generations of a population of reproducing organisms, and unfavorable heritable traits become less common.

So taking that definition we could quite easily state that the Human Population is no longer subject to the laws of natural selection, so then what are we subject to. Looking at technology we can see that the computers and electronics we are interacting with on a daily basis, are evolving in a very similar way to how we evolved. Starting with huge vacuum tubes in the 1940s to the miniscule transistors that are in everything today. The pace of the evolution is exponential growing but like most things including house prices at some point it has to stop, but its a long way off yet.

From this it could quite easily be argued that we are stagnant in our evolution and technology is not, we need to evolve to survive, so get them old transistors merged already.

You would think this isn't a big problem and its all about preserving the cultural identity each of us have in the UK. The problem is that whenever you try to buy or submit a form online, it takes 5mins instead of 2mins, just because you have to search for what system the website is using.

The different ways of putting countries in a list:

• England
• Great Britain
• United Kingdom
• UK
• Britain

There aren't that many, but when there is a list box, a couple of hundred countries long its get really really, tedious. Leading you to only one sane solution, if you ever meet the designer of the website (yes thats specifically aimed at the guys & gals who design the CollegeBoard site) tell them the importance of considering there cousins across the pond, and then proceed to batter them over the head with a world atlas. Until they submit to changing their forms to us UK.

You may wonder why I like it so much, well its quite simple. There is not another Olympic logo like it. Fair enough other Olympic logos work and indeed look good (see here) Only problem is they all look the same, they all have the same elements and all show some kind of recognisable symbol or mark, that is of the host nation. I like the London 2012 logo because its different, simple and there is nothing like it, even if it was a little expensive.

5 Reasons to switch from IE to something else:

1. Its Horrible confusing and counter-intuitive (in versions 5 - 7)
2. Its unSafe See Here
3. It causes headaches on a monumental scale, I only play with web design its not a serious job and it give me headaches I can only imagine what it does to the poor developers that design sites for a living.
4. Pop-Ups - whilst installing Google's toolbar and using pop-up blockers built into the latest version IE its still not good enough, with a couple of firefox extensions you can block anything you don't want easily and you can even stop the annoying "Zap Me!" ads
5. This is the simplest of all the reasons, its made by Microsoft and therefore supports there own proprietary software and activex controls, which should really be named entry points for spyware and nasty painfully hard to remove software that you simply don't want

Simply put switch and make your life more productive and Kill Off Bills Browser

In the beginning, the iPod let you listen to every CD you owned, even when you were stuck on the Red Line. Then Steve Jobs said, "Let there be video," and lo and behold, you could watch "Lost" die a slow, overwritten death on a two-inch screen. But while people seem content to load their little devices with as many songs and TV shows as possible, podcasts (think of them as radio programs that you download) tend to be neglected.
Listen and Learn With Podcasts - washingtonpost.com

The Answer = Not anytime soon
Why? it all falls down to the mentality of the person learning and the fact that listening to a podcast is a passive occupation, were as good learning will always be active.

Increasing technology use within schools, colleges and university's can do nothing but help the way we learn and consume that learning materials. Being able to access course materials 24/7 is a great resource to have but you don't remember the stuff you do aswell as you would from a classroom.

I think there will inevitably be some invention that takes podcasting and vidcasting out of the passive domain into the interactive and maybe then we can consider replacing the classroom. Until then I think classrooms are safe.

Designing in general can seem complicated and daunting but with just a few photoshop techniques in your toolbox. You can create a logo for you in a couple of hours or less.

You start with a blank sheet
Like all good things its best to start with no computer, a soft pencil, rubber and blank sheet of paper will do. Start by just randomly sketching something and then start working that into a logo (say you initials for example) You can spend as long as you like making this drawing look something like how you want it, but it doesn't have to be very neat.

Say Cheese
Next step take a photo of your design (or scan it) I tried drawing my logo free hand straight on the my fantastic Wacom Intuos3 tablet, but it never looked right. This way works best for those of us who aren't 100% confident with the graphics tablet.

Follow the Yellow Brick Road
Now for the slightly more complicated bit, open up your photo in photoshop and start using the pen tool, to trace over your logo. You can find a fantastic tutorial on the pen tool over on PixelPerfect
You can then continue and play with the path till its perfect (this is why you pencil drawing didn't need to be perfect)Then fill the path with a gradient by creating a gradient layer and using the path to mask it. Repeat this process until all elements of your logo.

Add a bit of text and you have yourself a logo. Its not that difficult, really. The harder part is making your website match your logo.

While its not quite upto the standard of Andromeda' we're getting closer.

http://www.dwavesys.com/

In my case i think that blogging has significantly improved my written (pity I didn't pick a-level english) I also find it easier to write longer more in-depth things that I would ordinarily just leave well alone.

Think of it, outside of the blogging context though. You write lots, you get better at writing, blogging is just an extension of that writing skill. You then have the flip side, the fact that you can get so into the blogging and other related things on the web that you then spend less time working and more time blogging. The key would seem to be getting the right balance of blogging and work, lets say the blog to work ratio. In my case I would love to spend every living moment making stuff for the web, and blogging. Alas I need to work because I aren't doing particularly well on the maths side of things but Computing is entirely other story.

Sorry for disjointed nature of this post, and the fact it would seem to posting for postings sake but I think it's genuinely instresting to actually see what benefits you get from blogging. We all want to blog or do we?

"Everyone thinks they have something to say, until they're put on stage and asked to say it." Mr Plummer

We (depending were you read this blog) live in countries with few or no laws on how to protect ourselves online, fair enough there's the DPA in the UK which goes somewhere near but there is no clear definition of what constitutes hacking or any other cyber-offence.

It stupidly simple to get access to a computer that you don't own that its scary. You can take a standard off the shelf USB stick, push it in a computer it will create you a Administrator account a remote user account and give you the password to anybody who logs into that machine. Many homes now are switching to wi-fi indeed BT offer there Home Hub which is wireless with all there packages, albeit with a very simple 64-bit encryption assigned to it, but who's responsibility is it to secure there wi-fi, I am firmly in the camp that if you leave it open its fair game to anybody, but just think about what you do online in a particular day and how much somebody could find about you it just a few hours on your network. Its enough to steal your Identity and rob you blind, yet many people just don't understand the scope of the problem.

It's all well and good knowing that these things are problems but how do we stop this from happening in the first place. As yet I haven't been able to come up with a single thing that could be feasibly enforced, or surrendering our own privacy to some higher power (which I don't think anybody in there right mind would be comfortable with. This is a problem that is almost as big as Global Warming if we manage to survive what ever apocalyptic event we make. Yet, we continue for the most part ignoring the fact it is a problem and how it would effect you if your identity was cloned and bank accounts cleaned, not a particularly nice thought.

I am amazed at ThinkFree Office it is exactly what a web app should be and the learning curve is 0 cos it looks just like office on you desktop. Wel done guys, and ThinkFree Office is my default Office of choice.

And I got this from 5 minutes using it.

http://blog.thinkfree.com/

Artilect: Artificial intelligence (also known as machine intelligence and often abbreviated as AI) is intelligence exhibited by any manufactured (i.e. ) system. The term is often applied to general purpose computers and also in the field of scientific investigation into the theory and practical application of AI. Wikipedia

An Article that dropped into my feed reader at the beginning of the week, describes a system devised by Hitatchi which monitors the person haemoglobin levels in the Brain (Optical Typography) The use of this is very limited now but could have a large impact on the way we intereface with technology but also for people who are paralysed, a clear example of converging technologies.

As part of New Scientists' 50 year aniversary there are a number of comments about what may/likely to happen in the next 50 years assuming we don't all Kill ourselves first (war or global warming).

Talk of a scientific understanding of consciousness still evokes more sucking in of air than most other subjects. Sceptics are fond of saying that a "factor X" that cannot even be imagined at the moment is required. I would argue the opposite: it is here, and it will be commonplace by 2056[...]

The key for us to fully understand the ramifications of creating an 'artilect' (AI) is we first need to understand our own brains and how they work, and also the fact we are imperfect and no doubt what we create will also be imperfect (could this cause a problem? could we become so obsessed with perfection we end up some 'borg' like race; I couldn't resist throwing that in)

Computation is the fire in our modern-day caves. By 2056, the computational revolution will be recognised as a transformation as significant as the industrial revolution. The evolution and widespread diffusion of computation and its analytical fruits will have major impacts on socioeconomics, science and culture.
Within 50 years, lives will be significantly enhanced by automated reasoning systems that people will perceive as "intelligent".[...]

I personally would go one step further and say the above will happen in the next 20 years, and we will see the first true AI system by 2056. Why? because these prediction always seem like under-estimates, they never anticipate that one person who does a single thing, accelerating the field of research forward.

I also had a Computing Lesson in which the teacher posed the question:

Prove To me that a human is nothing more than a biological operating system

At first I thought we are, then I started to disagree. My Arguments against were based on the fact "Windows/Linux/{Insert Your Favourite OS Here} doesn't create something new in its likeness, it cannot learn (at the moment anyway), similarly it an OS cannot procreate with another OS (as silly as it sounds)Redhat can't go to Windows and say lets make a little OS called 'Widhat' but this could be possible with Cybernetics could it not?

The main counter argument being, if we can read the brain and interpret its code it is just infact an OS, the controlling of things without physical movement (i.e. Brain Control) would seem to support this theory partly, but I am aren't entirely convinced.

Am Leaving this post open ended because I aren't sure were I want to go next and don't want to come to any conclusion.

Links

• BBC Horizon - Human v2.0
• Ray Kurzweil Website
• Hugo De Garris Website
• NewScientist Article on Brain Experiments
• Miguel Nicolelis Website
• Train Controlled by brain interface
• 50 Year of the New Scientist

Nine skills that separate good and great designers ~ Authentic Boredom

I never really took myself as much as a designer, I just know what looks good and what doesn't and what works and doesn't. I am starting to venture out into abit of web developing and learning a hell of alot along the way and really enjoying it.

I don't think I am at the stage were I could confidently create a wordpress theme from scratch but I aren't far off. Now, onto the link at the top of the page, I found it quite by accident (I can't remember now how exactly I didi find it) Its an excellent presentation, and has some interesting stuff for anybody in design, whether it be a beginner, semi-beginner (me) or Experienced.

With the web becoming a self-purpetuating cloud of buzz words and ways for us to communicate for free, could we live without it. Simple answer is; NO, we just couldn't live without the resoruce that is the web.

So why is this? Well a biased look at myself might be a place to start so: I sit a my mac far too long and have often been told to get a life, but every bit of information I could ever want is at hand be it current affairs, or historical information or maybe just what did I put in that e-mail yesterday - its all there, and it even follows me around.

So what of the generation that is not of the internet age, i.e. my parents. So theres my mum who buys and sells on eBay, my dad uses a Powerbook to do the photography stuff he enjoys and casually surfs the net.
My sister is sucked into the IM revolution, the fact I only get messages saying "jack my computers broke how do I fix it?" I don't really bother with it.

My sister doesn't have a mySpace account and neither do I, and this is where my problem begins with web 2.0 I like having access to all the breadth of information but I arent interested in the social networking rubbish. We are already to dependant on Computers, and people are getting Fatter and Fatter, but there is, nothing like a face to face conversation with somebody, you can correspond with somebody via e-mail (this is espescially true in business) and like what you hear, but when you actually see the person you don't after having a face to face conversation, doing everything online cuts out this judgement.

I only see mySpace as a collecting pot for the popular and the unpopular and the people in the middle of the scale just dont fit in with the way the system works, we then have the inherent problems with such a online network which have been widely published but no-one has come up with a solution that works. The actual solution is quite simple, do it in the real world.

Moving on from my rant on mySpace, and on to broader things. The internet is starting to populate every little facet of out lives, I don't go a morning without checking my emails and reading the latest news online, but also its going further there are fridges that will do your shopping online for you, all you have to do is zap the barcode on the way out from the fridge.

Are we becoming the masters of our on destruction, putting all our things online centralizing everything we are certainly already more at risk to ID theft and fraud. Do we need to become more aware of the security of our details? and should we constantly be thinking online we are at risk?

On the flip side, we benefit in areas putting everything online, by having having everything within reach at any web access point, I can sit down in town and tell my iMac at home to record a film on that night with a click. My phone can alert me when that important e-mail drops in my inbox. Overall I would say I am the worst organized person I know, but having multiple ways to access my data I have so far managed to keep everything going and on-time, especially with college stuff.

I think overall we shouldn't get paranoid but, we should be ever more aware about how much about us we put online and how many databases we are in and what that data does when it is no longer used. Is it wrong to ask a company like google to remove all you details from there databases (think google Accounts) when you no longer use there service anymore and is there a procedure for this, the UKs data protection act says not, but other countries aren't so controlling in this regard; just this morning i got 4 e-mails from lycos even though I said remove my details from there database.

Do we need a universal law, on data protection and use on the internet? Would you sleep easier at night?

I think its weird that I didn't think of it sooner, but seen as I use google almost exclusively its slightly understandable, but by that logic also if you advertise with Yahoos equivalent of AdWords are you going to get less results than using AdWords. This is once again Googles biggest asset slapping me around the face, the Brand.

We had a power cut yesterday and i could do nothing while the power came back on (about 35mins). We couldn't ring out on the Landline or VOIP line, watch the tele, do my day-to-day business on the interweb, i couldn't even hoover(yes i was forced to tidy up, and i still haven't finished)

But just think how much of our infrastructures are dependant on electricty? Increasingly Phones, Traffic Lights, Safety systems (these should have back-up power) Even the bare essentials are effected, showers, heating/AC, Cook Appliances. Practically everything goes off, i would be interesting to see how we could manage without power. The big power cut in New York a few years back highlights out dependancy how many millions did it cost and how many people were trapped or unable to commute in that 14hour stretch.

No moving to focus on the UK, with the amount of redundancy in the National Grid dropping as more and more pwer stations are taken offline we are going to face more and more power-cuts, which means we have to get big on renewables or nuclear, or even both. I have to say i arent a fan of nuclear but the fact is there is that many people who object to the current viable renewable means that nuclear is the only option.

N.B. I couldn't be bothered to link to sources for the information but it is freely available have a quick google.