The train seemed to be a bit slow on the way to London then he tube was packed (because I was in the middle of rush hour) and seemed to crawl the remainder of my journey. Being late into work was particularly annoying because I was supposed to run some system maintenance starting at 8am and now I’ve got to reschedule it. Most of the actual working day ticked along fine until somehow, and this is the first time in 2 years I’ve done it, I got on the wrong train and ended up in Peterborough. Once I got back to Cambridge I discovered I’d got a flat rear tyre on my bike.I finally got home nearly 4 hours after after I left work for a trip that normally takes a about an hour and fourty-five minutes.

What a day . . .

I’ve decided to start this day on a more positive note with a thank you to a few people who, in small ways, helped to make things yesterday just a little better.

The first was a telephone Customer Services representative. On Tuesday morning while running down the platform for my morning train my bike light fell out of my cycle helmet and slide off the platform. I couldn’t do anything about it at the time but on Wednesday morning (yesterday) I noticed it was still there. Later that day I tried to call Cambridge station to ask if it was possible for someone to collect it for me. Unable to find a number I called National Express customer services. The lady I spoke to told me that she didn’t have a direct number for Cambridge station and she couldn’t put me through because ‘”the stations don’t like getting phone calls”. I expressed my disbelief that there was no way I could get through to the station, explained why I wanted to talk to them and she offered to help. She took my information, rang the station, talked to the platform guard and called me back with some information.

You could say that she was ‘only doing her job’ but she did it happily, efficiently and politely. Thank you.

Number 2 and we’re back to my dropped bike light. On returning to Cambridge following my epic trip via Peterborough I spoke to the guard on the platform. He of course knew nothing about the phone call or the prior arrangement having only started work an hour before, however, after waiting five minutes for the next train to go through (probably very sensible) he was more than happy to walk down the platform with me and collect my light off the tracks.

Simple, courteous, uncomplaining. Thank you.

As mentioned when I got to my bike I discovered I had a flat type. I don’t have a pump in my bag (idiot I know) and no one unlocking bikes at that point had a pump. Getting a cab home would cost around £8 plus a £10 surcharge to carry my bike (!!). The Station apparently doesn’t carry a bike pump (why would they, there’s only about 1000 bikes locked up there every day), the bike shop had closed and the British Transport Police we absent as always. With no other option I start the annoying 3 miles walk home, wheeling my bike.

As I reached the end of the car park 3 (probably) female students turned in the other end, one of them also wheeling a bike. Worth an ask I thought and so it was as she had a basic, but totally functional, pump with her. They all stopped for a chat while I sorted my tyre out and wished me well, hoping that the quick fix would last my journey home.

It didn’t cost them anything more than time but for helping a total stranger in need, thank you.

Finally, to theWife . . . just for being theWife . . . thank you

Now . . .fingers crossed I’ll have a better day today

Now the big hype machine of Apple (or I should say the big internet rumour machine and Apples rumour squashing machine) is gearing itself up for the release of the iTablet (or whatever they decide to call it) at MacWorld in January. Pictures of backplates are emerging from suppliers, stories of orders for huge numbers of 10 inch touch screens are being talked about and Apple is saying nothing, as usual. (Google is currently showing 11,000,000 results for a search for Apple Tablet)The closest we’ve actually come to a full Apple denial on for this mythical device was an interview with Steve Jobs at WWDC earlier his year when he said in response to a question about Apple making an eBook that Apple wasn’t in making a single use device (hence the move away from the traditional iPod to he iPod touch).

Despite all the ‘clues’ as to what’s coming I’m still struggling to believe that Apple is actually going to deliver. Not because I don’t think they can do it, I just really can’t see the point of it or where the device would fit into my life.

If we assume that the device is going to be a 10 or so inch touch panel with an multi-touch OS designed specifically around the touch interface I can see that it would be great for watching movies on . . . but so is my 13″ MacBook Pro, and that doesn’t need any sort of stand to enable me to put it down to watch a film on it. As a remote control for use with AppleTV 10″ is WAY too big, and the remote app for the iPhone/iPod is damn near perfect. You couldn’t type on it very well because a) your hands would be covering the screen, cutting the viewable area in half and b) it wouldn’t be very comfortable (try typing on a hard surface, it feels weird and it’ll hurt your fingers after a while)

If it’s just a panel then it’s likely to be somewhat delicate (I have experience in this area with a twice broken eBook reader) and if it’s more than just a panel then it’s going o be quite heavy to hold. If you were going to try and paint/draw on it then again, you’ll be cutting of the viewable area on the screen and you should probably go out and buy a graphics tablet instead.

Every time I think of a use I could have for a tablet machine I think of a reason why an existing device would be better. That doesn’t mean that limited market sectors would find it useful but I just can’t see Apple making device for a small market sector right now.

However . . . and it’s a pretty big however, one of the things Apple seems to do really well is simplify, stylise and reinvent devices, at the same time painting a reason into your life as to why you need it. They did it with the iMac, the iPod and the iPhone so who’s to say that they can’t do it again, but as of right now I just can’t see a good reason for the iTablet to exist other than, well, it’d be kinda cool

So to answer he question what is Google Wave? It’s a real time updating version-controlled interactive wiki messaging system, ish

Is it really the next-big-thing ™ from the almightily Google or is it actually a useless overhyped piece of crap??  Well the answer to both of these questions is obviously no (although the overhyped claim may be somewhat justified

One of the problems with Google Wave is that it’s new.  Google said at one point that the set out to create what email would have been like had it been created now, in the Web 2.0 (tm again?) world. However, it’s also been described as like IM on steroids.

Both of these descriptions are misleading because Google Wave is neither, less and more . . . however, using those terms when trying to describe Google Wave seems to be what’s causing a lot of problems so we’re going to have to introduce some Wave terminology here or things are going to get very confused. There’s not much to know but it’ll become very obvious why it’s needed very quickly. What we would traditional call a message in Email or perhaps a conversation in IM is known as a Wave. Individual posts inside each Wave are known as Blips (a stupid name if you ask me but I guess they needed to call them something that wasn’t already being used in another space).

Using Google Wave feel familiar at first, hen gets a bit weird when more experienced users start doing things that you don’t know how to do and probably didn’t know were possible. In the same way that, with email being simple text, you can put comment inline in your reply, you can reply to an individual Blip inside a Wave. If the Wave has already moved on these replies are indented to differentiate them from the rest of the Wave. So it’s all sounding a bit more like Email now right? As usual with Wave, yes and no.

When you start a Wave you invite people to it. These Waves will then appear inside the invitees Inboxes. Wave seems to retain a permanent connection with the Google servers so a new Wave invite will appear immediately in your Inbox once it’s created.  You don’t have to wait for the person who created the Wave to actually do anything with it. All participants inside the Wave can type at the same time, either adding Blips onto the bottom of the wave or replying to Blips at other places inside the Wave.  You can see how this could get very chaotic pretty fast if you’re not careful.

To try and combat this new Blips are highlighted inside the Wave and the Wave title in your Inbox shows you how many unready blips are in each of your Waves. You can either click on an individual Blip to unmark it or press the Read button at the top of the Wave to mark the entire thing as read.  There’s no idea at the moment of marking Blips as read when you scroll past them and with he interactive nature of a Wave that’s a good thing. You don’t want to miss something that’s been said as a reply to a Blip much higher up the Wave.

One of the advantages of Google Wave over Email is the confusion of email forwarding.  Ok, so it’s not that confusing but being able to add people into a Wave after it’s started and have them be able to read the whole thing is going to be very useful. As will be the ability to be able to replay the Wave ‘s creation showing who said what when to allow people to get up to speed with the flow of the Wave.

But wait, there’s more.  If during a Wave you need to have either a private discussion with someone in it that you want to keep in context, or just to prevent the Wave getting overly noisy for everyone, you can create a private reply o a Blip and add only those Wave participants you want to be able to see it.

Getting it yet? No, you’re not really because there’s more . . . a Blip that I have typed can be edited by anyone else in the Wave (you can see why being able to see who created what and when is going to get far more important). Then there are also Wave extensions. At the moment these are restricted to things that you can embed inside the Wave such as maps, pictures and polls but anything could happen.

So to answer he question what is Google Wave? It’s a real time updating version-controlled interactive wiki messaging system, ish

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• New iPod touches with cameras are pretty much a given, particularly after an online store put up pics of it’s new cases a tad early, whoops
• iTunes 9, I think it’s about time Apple did something about helping people to organise their iPhone apps and, rumour has it, they’ve been working for a while on some sort of social integration (presumably to compete with Last.fm and Spotify. It’s probably about time Apple and iTunes got into supporting Blue-Ray discs too
• I’d be very surprised if the Beatles catalogue wasn’t made available on iTunes. Rock Band Beatles and all the new remastered  CD’s are out today so why not – having said that and EMI rep earlier said it wasn’t going to happen.  Smoke and mirrors??
• a new music format.  Something called Cocktail has been kicking around for a while. It’s supposidly a new album format that includes lyrics, artwork and other goodies designed to encourage people to buy whole albums rather than individual tracks.  Unfortunately you can probably also expect it to come DRM’d up to the eyeballs
• and they’ll probably bump up the storage on the rest of the iPod range, and maybe the Apple TV too

and what’s not happening,

• The much vaunted Apple Tablet . . . nope, no way no how. It’s just not the right time for Apple to introduce this (and I’m not really convinced they’re particularly useful anyway).  I’ll eat my hat if Apple show up with this
• dropping the iPod Classic. Why?? There’s no other iPod with this amount of storage yet. Once the nano gets it’s storage above 100G for a reasonable amount of cash then you’ll see that back of this but not until
• integrated AppleTV/HDTV, lol, don’t make me laugh!

#morningtoncrescent hmm, would have gone with West Ruislip but with the Monument/Bank interchange still b0rkd it'll have to be Hatch End #

oooooffff . . . have eaten too much, leaving the curry house now #

goodnight Twitter (facebook) . . . going to bed now to dream that I didn't just totally blow #pectember with that curry #

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I should really go to bed now – gonna be wrecked at 6am tomorrow morning #

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There’s a lot going on at the moment so I figured I’d start chatting again on here, probably more as an extension of things I Tweet about but there you go. I wonder how long the updates will last this time

Head over to amazon.co.uk and search for software in the books section.  Unless something’s changed you to will end up with a list of 103,616 books, most of which are, fairly reasonably, of a technical nature.  Scroll down a little and select the Fiction category (containing a far more reasonable 217 entries).

Sitting there proudly at the top of the list, with the default sorting of ‘by relevance’ is The Ultimate Technical Trading Software: In Search of the Holy Grail . . . erm, what? It does feel about right though.  The economy is currently in a state of meltdown due in part to people using software to predict the movement of the markets in order to make more cash . . . then other people using different software to predict the behaviour of the first software and the people using it.  Then still more people using software to predit the behavior of the software that’s predicting the behaviour of the software that’s predicting the behaviour of the markets (I think that was right).

At some point people started making money off the behaviour of the software rather than on the behaviour and all of a sudden our financial system is down the rabbit hole or through the looking glass and we are just creating money out of thin air. At some point of course someone took a trick from the The Emperors New Clothes and said “He’s naked!” . . . end result, global recession . . . ho hum