Status-Q

Dinner tonight at the splendidly-named Bar Q. It does Asian-style barbecue (and, by the way, comes highly recommended).

The friend who met us there was asking the waitress how business was going (since so many NY restaurants last only a few months). She said it was good, but the pattern of business changed in the summer because so many people go away for weekends, and she came up, completely seriously, with what I thought was a wonderfully New-York phrase. She said that

Wednesday/Thursday is the new Friday/Saturday

Well, after our flight from Detroit to New York was cancelled twice in a row and delayed for an uncertain period on our third attempt, we decided that 36 hours of delay was quite enough for a 2 hour flight and we should take our destiny into our own hands.

So we’re driving. This comes to you from a thoroughly uninspiring Best Western in Youngstown, Ohio, where we’ve broken our journey. Normally I quite enjoy long cross-country drives in the States, as long as I have plenty of time to stop and explore the back-roads. This time, however, we need to see Rose’s publishers before the flight home, so I think we’ll hit the highway again tomorrow for 7 hours or so on the cruise control…

Update: Well, we got to New York in the end, and, even including a reasonable night’s sleep and meals, we still managed to travel an average of 28 miles per hour for the last 24 hours!

I was out with my brother-in-law a couple of days ago, when his mobile phone beeped. He looked at it and handed it to me.

“It says I have a ‘text message’. What’s that? And how do I read it?”

I was reading a discussion about whether or not it was worth buying AppleCare – Apple’s extended warranty – on your new iPod/laptop/desktop. It reminded me of another discussion, several years ago, when a friend pointed out to me that all insurance policies of any sort will, statistically, lose you money. If they were worthwhile for the purchaser, they wouldn’t be worthwhile for the manufacturer/insurer, and they exist only because they make money. Money for other people. People who aren’t you.

Now, it’s not always easy to keep that fact in mind when you suddenly get a £700 bill for a new logic board on the laptop you bought 18 months ago. You forget that you saved £120 by not buying the extended warranty on the elderly fridge which is still working fine, and the TV, and more on the last laptop, and your last three mobiles… and so forth, all of which add up to much more than the immediate bill that looks so distressing.

So you should only buy insurance when the thing you’re guarding against is so expensive that you really couldn’t afford to be hit by it (which must also mean that it’s terribly unlikely, or you couldn’t afford the premium), when you’re legally obliged to, or when you have good reason to believe that it’s very much more likely to happen to you than to anybody else. For anything else, if you feel pangs of angst when the salesman starts putting pressure on you to buy his lucrative extended warranty, set up a special savings account and put the money there instead. If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs, you’ll be better off in the end, my friend!

The US/Canada edition of Rose’s latest book officially hits the shelves next week. We’re heading over to Michigan for the launch, and stopping briefly in New York on the way back.

But apparently, people who ordered it on Amazon have started receiving their copies. So I thought I’d let my transatlantic readers know, just in case… there’s a link on Rose’s site if you get the urge… 🙂

Today is annual System Administrator Appreciation Day. If you get frustrated with the occasional problems on your computer, spare a thought for the guy who has to spend his life fixing those problems for other people’s benefit, while absorbing their frustration! The problems are not normally of his making…

So hug a sysadmin today….
[well, ok, that may be too much… but at least buy him a pint]

Oh, and while I’m on the subject of iPhone software, here’s a handy hint. In the browser and in various other apps there’s a special ‘.com’ key which saves you a few keystrokes.

What’s not so obvious is that you can press and hold on that key to get some other options.

Now, if someone can work out how to add ‘.co.uk’…

A great talk by Cory Doctorow last night – he spoke for an hour but packed in more words than most people would manage in two hours, and certainly more insights.

One phrase I liked:

“Innovation happens when people can afford to fail”

This is exactly right. I’ve said a related thing before in a talk about innovation: “Redundancy pay is a wonderful thing”. For many people, especially young people, it’s the first time they get a chance to raise their heads, look around and think about options beyond the next month’s pay cheque.

Most people will not, or cannot, risk the roof over their family’s heads, or their career prospects, or their employees’ livelihoods, if that’s the price of experimenting and failing. The thing Silicon Valley got right is the understanding that a high proportion of new ideas will fail, and that’s OK, because enough of them won’t. If investors looking at proposals, or employers looking at CVs, or governments thinking about policy, understand and allow failure (in moderation, of course), then great things can happen!

Many thanks to Neil Davidson of Red Gate Software for the invitation to the talk.

Following on from my earlier post about average speed checks, Thomas Hunger pointed me at this story about in-car technology defeating an instantaneous speed check.

I do use a GPS logging device in my car; you never know, it might prove useful one day! A UK speeding ticket costs rather more than a GPS logger now.

Note that I’m not encouraging people to break the law here, just to be able to defend themselves if wrongfully accused 🙂

Dan Gillmor gives this nice piece of advice to students using Wikipedia for research:

It’s a great place to start; a terrible place to stop.