Status-Q

This is probably a very obvious thought to those who wear glasses more frequently than I do…

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could get rotationally-polarised contact lenses? Then contact-lens wearers could just walk into 3D movies and not have to wear low-quality plastic glasses like the rest of us. It would probably be a much better experience.

I remember my mother telling me about visiting an African orphanage for young blind children, a long time ago. The children asked her to go into the dormitory and read them a bedtime story. When she got there, however, it was pitch black. The children didn’t need any lights to get ready for bed, but there was no way she could read them anything. So, instead, they pulled out their braille books and read her stories, a role-reversal which delighted everybody.

Well, maybe those of you who have had to put up with various eyesight-enhancement technologies and found them to be a nuisance in the past will soon have an advantage over those of us who can’t get retina-projected Google maps so easily…

Thanks to Richard Watts for prompting the idea…

Rose and I invented a new word this week. It’s a technical cycling term, so may not become widespread, but I think we may see rapid adoption of it in East Anglia and the Netherlands.

ishybutt (ˈɪʃibʌt) (also ishibutt)
noun the experience of sitting on a bicycle saddle, only to discover that it has been raining.

Hope you find it useful in daily conversation.

John's been writing about the somewhat bizarre practice of LinkedIn 'endorsements', where you can affirm that an acquaintance really has the skills they say they have.

Well, frankly, I wouldn't, in the first place, link to anyone I thought was likely to lie on their CV. I'm old-fashioned enough to remember the days when a LinkedIn connection was meant to imply some sort of endorsement in itself.

Interestingly, you can also endorse people's expertise in skills they never knew they had. I never listed any on my LinkedIn page until some kind friend said I was awfully good at 'Architecture', which I assume they meant in the sense of 'computer systems architecture', but, who knows, perhaps they had seen my old garden shed modifications? Hoping for some interesting job offers from that one.

It is, of course, a brilliant marketing trick on LinkedIn's part. In a world where page hit numbers are everything, it's hard to imagine a better email campaign to make users feel obliged to come back to your site over and over again.

When it all started, I added 'LinkedIn Endorsing' to my list of skills, and a couple of friends have kindly endorsed my abilities in that area. So maybe, by way of bringing a little festive cheer, I should be endorsing their LinkedIn-endorsing-endorsing?

Oh, and Happy Christmas, everybody!