How to Pack Right

By | November 22, 2011
3 Comments

Here’s a piece I wrote for the latest issue of DestinAsian magazine on travel strategies for uncertain times (I have a regular column called Tech Travel in the travel magazine):

The way we travel will continue to change, and we will need to adapt to it, especially when it comes to the technology that tethers us to the office or to loved ones. And, in case any of you are grumbling about carry-on restrictions, or the long snaking lines for airport security checks, or the difficulty of arriving looking fresh and gorgeous at our destination when we’re not allowed to carry moisturizer, makeup, or hair gel onto the plane, I would offer this: There are ways around all these problems.

Among the tips I offer are checking in bulkier gadgets, so long as they’re well protected, shipping luggage ahead of time, ordering smaller versions of toiletries and other necessities and having them sent straight to your hotel. The bottom line, at least with technology:

And when it comes to technology, remember that everything to do with gadgets is replaceable except the data—whether it’s documents or holiday snaps. So before you pack—back up. However long the queues, and however miserable the humiliations inflicted upon you by security measures, you’ll know at least the important stuff is safe.

I’m aware when I write these stories that there must be a lot more tips that I could offer that I just don’t hear about. I would love to hear from you if you have any. There was a good one in a recent Fortune issue quoting a guy called Dean Burri, who keeps his ties flat by putting them in folders, customizing jacket and coat pockets for tickets and sewing Velcro between shirt buttons to stop them from wrinkling.

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Talking About Two Generations

By | November 22, 2011
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 Nothing captures the intersection between the old and the new worlds, as well as the ambivalence many of us must share about the direction, than this NYT piece (there’s a version in the IHT, but they edit out several key bits for space) about the tension between the remaining members of The Who, Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey (bassist John Entwistle died in 2002, original drummer Keith Moon in 1978):

Mr. Townshend, always interested in new technology, announced that the concerts would be Webcast, only to retract those plans a few days later at Mr. Daltrey’s insistence. Eventually, the band made a deal with Sirius Satellite Radio to broadcast the shows as part of an all-Who channel that will continue throughout the tour.

“I don’t particularly like the world technology has created,” Mr. Daltrey said. “Has anything really gotten better with the computer, or are you just doing more and more of less and less? I’m incredibly paranoid about it, especially after what happened to Pete. I think the Internet is just an advertising device of very dubious returns.

Daltrey is referring to Townshend’s arrest on charges of possessing child pornography. Daltrey could easily be characterized here as a reactionary Who Doesn’t Get It (that could be another album title, perhaps) but it’s more complex than that. Daltrey was never the creative engine of the band but there’s no denying his personality and voice are integral to its legend. But he also has a business acumen that doesn’t always sit well in this new media world, but cannot be ignored:

“Also, I haven’t got the luxury of throwing the kind of money at it that he can,” he continued, referring to Mr. Townshend’s songwriting revenue. “I haven’t got the publishing, I’m just the singer. So I have to look at it much more hard-nosed as a business and ask if I can put a million dollars into it, and the answer is no.”

Townshend, the artist (and presumably comfortably provided for with decades of publishing revenue under his belt) can afford to be the modern visionary:

Mr. Townshend responded: “Roger likes things that are finished, and with the Internet, everything is a work in progress. I try not to bludgeon him with this stuff, but I can’t help it; it’s my passion.”

Impressive that these two guys managed to stay together this long, and testament to both of them. But I guess is what is most interesting is that both guys have a point. I feel caught in both camps — I still think of artists as those who labor away in garrets, cellers, studios or mansions creating something of genius, something that really lifts us out of our time and age, before delivering it to us adoring and wowed fans.

This is no longer the case with new-media influenced art, and the contrast is nowhere clearer than in the perceptions of The Who’s two remaining men about their latest offering, Endless Wire:

For Mr. Daltrey, “Endless Wire” closes a door for the band that was left open after the death of the high-flying Mr. Moon (about whom he is developing a film project, with Mike Myers committed to the role). “We were ill equipped to deal with Keith’s problems at the time,” he said. “If we’d known then what we know now about rehabilitation, we wouldn’t have lost him. So it always felt that if that had really been the end, it wouldn’t have been right. With this album, now there can be an ending. I don’t want it to be, but it can be, and I’m at peace with that.”

Mr. Townshend, characteristically, disagreed with that assessment. “It doesn’t feel like closure; it feels completely new,” he said. “Closure implies that we couldn’t do it again, couldn’t do another album with the same quality and dignity.

Townshend is as impressive as he is combative. Perhaps he’s right. Or maybe while his passion is the impermanence of the Internet, Daltrey’s passion is that of a man looking back and seeing something that has gone, never to return.

The Blog-Browsing Worker

By | November 22, 2011
4 Comments

Is blogging kept alive by office-bound shirkers?

Some blogs get huge amounts of comments, which always makes me wonder: When do people actually find the time to write these things? I can understand folk adding a comment if it’s something work related, but if it’s a blog about soccer, this can hardly be considered vital to the office’s wellbeing. I was gobsmacked (UK English for ‘knocked back in my seat’ or ‘you could have knocked me over with a feather’), for example, to see nearly 250 comments on one blog posting over at The Guardian’s sportblog on whether or not Liverpool’s manager Rafa Benítez is “making a dog’s dinner” of his team. Vital stuff, as you may imagine, but 250 comments?

The good thing about The Guardian’s blog system is that each comment shows the time when the comment was posted and where the author is located. (This latter bit of information could be faked, of course, but let’s assume for the sake of argument it’s not.) So when do these people post their comments — on their own time, or their bosses’? (Perhaps this question has been better addressed in surveys elsewhere; if so, I’d love to hear about them, and will just regard the following experiment as a midly diverting pastime. I’ve seen less focused surveys by AOL, Advertising Age, CNET, Websense and The Guardian, but nothing that specifically mentions blogging or commenting.)

Allowing for time zones, and based on precisely one blog entry, I’d say the latter. Commenters generally seem to be doing it from work. Assuming a work day from around 8 am to 12 pm, a lunchbreak of around two hours (yeah I know that’s laughable, but we have to assume that someone reading and commenting on a blog between 12 pm and 2 pm may be on their break), then working from 2-6 pm, that’s where most of the action is, whatever timezone you’re in (this blog entry also has comments from as far afield as Canada and New Zealand.) Then for the hell of it I divided the rest of the day between 6 to 10 pm, as a sort of recreational period, and then 10-12 pm as a sort of post-pub haze, when we used to watch crazy kats on Open University but now surf the web. Then there’s the midnight to 8 am period, a twilight zone for commenters.

This is what it looks like, starting at midnight:

0-8       6.6%
8-12    20.3%
12-2    16.2%
2-6      39.0%
6-10      7.5%
10-12   10.4%

Or as a Sparkline:

Based on this very limited example (where comments — as usual — deteriorate into a slanging match between a few individuals) it’s clear that most commenting is done on work time, with the Post-Prandial Surf the most popular period. Despite the generous two-hour lunch window offered in the survey, fewer people made comments during that period than during the pre-lunch morning period, suggesting lunch time is too important to waste on reading blogs. And even if you only take the 8-12 and 2-6 periods as worktime, that still accounts for nearly two thirds of the comments. I’d say, based on this, the workplace seems to be the preferred blog-reading/commenting locale.

An Unlikely Blogger Expelled

By | November 22, 2011
1 Comment

Although it’s not good for Sudan, I think it’s good for blogging: CNN reports that 

The government of Sudan on Sunday gave the top U.N. official in the country three days to leave, marking the latest hurdle in international efforts to bring peace to the nation torn apart by civil war.

Sudan expelled Jan Pronk, the top U.N. envoy to Sudan, who has openly criticized Khartoum as well as rebel groups on his Web log.

Pronk has been running a blog for nearly a year and while it doesn’t look like your average blog (really long posts, no external links, no comments, blogs numbered as if they were official UN documents) it’s an impressively direct account of the Sudanese conflict. His third post started as follows: 

This week the seventh round of the Abuja talks between the Government of Sudan and the rebel movements will start. Will it be the last one, producing a peace agreement before the end of the year? The chances are diminishing.

Not the sort of mealy-mouthed stuff we’re used to from senior UN officials. And it’s probably upset the UN as much as it’s upset the Sudanese government. But if so why had the UN not closed him down earlier? Pronk, according to UPI, did not offer any disclaimers, but the UN has since made clear he was writing in a personal capacity. The UN has “no rules barring blogging specifically, though employees face restrictions when publishing articles and participating in interviews.” It seems Pronk was probably senior enough, and his comments uncontroversial enough, for no one to mind too much. Until last week.

What I like about it is that reporters tend to meet these kind of people in the field, and it’s great to hear them sounding off about the situation, but rarely are their words captured in sufficient quantity for their great background knowledge and high level involvement in such diplomatic processes to be read by a wider audience. I’ve not followed the tragedy in Darfur much beyond what I read in the papers, but Pronk’s year-long posts are a diary of immense and satisfying detail about the process, peppered by great photos, that are worthy of more than the word blog. 

Take this one, for example, from June 28: 

There is a significant risk that the Darfur Peace Agreement will collapse. The agreement does not resonate with the people of Darfur. On the contrary, on the ground, especially amongst the displaced persons, it meets more and more resistance. In my view it is a good text, an honest compromise between the extreme positions taken by the parties during the negotiations in Abuja. That is why the UN, like all international partners, has endorsed the agreement. However, in politics objective rational calculations will always be confuted by subjective emotional perceptions and aspirations. And those perceptions are that the agreement does not meet the expectations of the people in Darfur, has been forced upon them and, rather than meeting the interests of all parties somewhere halfway, only strengthens the position of the government and a minority tribe, the Zaghawa.

That too me is very clear writing, reflecting his knowledge of the situation on many levels. Not every situation could allow a senior figure involved deeply in the political process to write so frankly and openly, but wouldn’t it be great if they could? This to me is the real potential of blogs and citizen reporting. Someone who really knows what is going on telling us about it.

PS: Jan Pronk has a reputation of sorts in Indonesia, my current abode. He earned the lasting enmity of then president Suharto by

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Wire Mesh and Lost Souls

By | November 22, 2011
3 Comments

You have to love the Internet. It brings you into contact with all sorts of unusual people, the likes of which I haven’t encountered since my days of being driven by tuk-tuk around the sois of 1980s Bangkok. Here’s Linda, for example, who just asked to be my buddy on Skype, introducing herself thus:

Me! A Chinese girl! My main work is to sale wire,wire mesh and wire rods!If you need my service, please contact me unhestantly!

I just don’t know when I’m going to need wire, wire mesh or wire rods so I’ve added her to my contact list. Now I can see the commercial benefits of Skype.

And then there’s my blog. Frankly, it drives me nuts, but two years ago I wrote about how awful some Nokia service centers were, and now it’s become the Mecca for any Indian resident looking for a service center. Why me? And why India? Heaven knows, and I’ve tried to explain I’m not a Nokia Service Center, but still they come. This, for example, just now, from Sreedhar Durbhakula:

I purchased NOKIA 3120 handset before one year. Now it has created me some problem like some times I am finding the device Switchd Off. I need to switch on the set to work with it. Some times it is showing blank screen and again loading the signal lines and feature.Some times when I press some key for my operations it won’t respond and will get switched off showing me the blank screen. Please let me know what caused the problem? How much would be the cost for getting repaired.. I am in India Bangalore..If possible let me know the good customer Care Center in Bangalore..?

This is one of more than 100 comments left on that page, nearly all complaints or moving accounts from India of failed bids to get Nokia’s care and attention. Frankly I am developing a warped view of the subcontinent, as this place criss-crossed by lost souls bearing malfunctioning handsets, desperately looking for salvation in the form of a glowing Nokia logo.

Anyway, maybe I should introduce them all to Linda. A wire rod or two may be just the answer.

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