Blogging Nick Piggott

This is my first shot at mobile blogging entirely from the mobile (Nokia 6680) on GPRS. The reason is that I’m camping in North Devon (just a short skip from home, compared to those poor Londoners who arrived at 2300 having spent 6 hours on the motorway), and everyone else is watching the Manchester derby match in the bar. This is wrong in a big way, as it’s a glorious day here on the beach. I may be blogging on the mobile, but my tan is great and I’m topping up my karma.That’s something that some people misunderstand. I enjoy playing with technology, and it’s as relaxing as it can be stressful. This is a bit of play time, with a beer on a beach in the sun. I expect to play some beach cricket once the footy ends. That’ll be equally as fun, despite my appalling bowling.

I know opinion over mobile interaction are sharply divided between those who beleive in the uniform availability of content and functionality across mobile and fixed platforms (that’s me) and those who see mobile as merely an awkward shopfront for ringtones and wallpapers. The basis of their argument is that mobile screens are so small as to make serious use unlikely. The way that I’m persevering typing this blog entry using predictive text designed for SMS probably does nothing to dispell that. I also expect to spend twenty minutes or so linking this entry to the photo I just uploaded to flickr from this same mobile.

But this will change. New text entry systems, better browsers, larger screens, and a more mobile generation will even out the differences between the wired and wireless modes, and blogging from the mobile on the beach will be the norm. Until then, it’ll be an interesting way for geeks (like me) to kill time in the sun waiting for boring football matches to end.

James Cridland is leaving Virgin Radio to join the BBC. It’s probably a superb move for James, as I suspect the BBC is infinitely more resourced and inclined to support experimentation and innovation than Virgin Radio will be in the future.

It’s disappointing for commercial radio though. Through his work at Virgin, commercial radio did get some great press coverage for innovation, and he is/was a darned useful sounding board and foil for ideas that should benefit all commercial broadcasters. Hopefully that insight will still be available over beer (but no longer at the Midas Touch, thank goodness), but it’ll be a different kind of discussion now.

I have always felt that James embraced the principles of “agree on technology, compete on content”, and I hope he’s allowed to continue doing so within the Corporation.

Meanwhile commercial radio has lost a star, albeit not one in front of a microphone. There’s historically been a talent drift from commercial radio to the BBC, as the BBC offers platforms and opportunities on a bigger scale than commercial radio. In the past that talent drift has mainly been presenters and programmers; I wonder if this is the beginning of a similar process for smart technologists?

Here’s something that made me laugh this week. Say hello to “Wok & Roll“, which is a Chinese style (emphasis on “style”) food outlet at Pier C of Newark International Airport (EWR).

There’s so many connections between Chinese restuarant owners and Elvis Presley, that I was dying to find a boke dishing out special friend rice in sideburns and a white diamante jumpsuit. But I wasn’t in luck

It was, however, pretty good sushi and generous (American-sized) portions of Sweet and Sour chicken, which was just brill prior to jumping onto CO076 back to Bristol International Airport (BRS). Once at Bristol (6hrs19mins later) it was 45 mins from landing on the runway to being back at my desk, which is another darn good reason to use a regional airport rather than slavishly going to Heathrow.

View From Melody FM
Originally uploaded by NickPiggott.

I’m just remincising here. When I used to work in Austria, this was the view from my office window. I miss it. My view from the office here in Bristol is nice (park, harbour), but not quite the same.

I’d better get it out of my system.

It’s 15 years, near enough, since I got my first domain. (OK – sub-domain of demon.co.uk). I’m still paying £11.75 a month for it, which is frankly ludicrous, but goddamit, I’m emotionally attached to it now. I still get mail on it – from spambots, from ex-colleagues, from friends I’d lost touch with (intentionally and unintentionally). So I fork out £10+VAT a month for Internet nostalgia. As it’s a demon sub-domain, I have no alternative but to keep paying them.

It’s 20 years since I started communicating with people digitally.

I wrote BBS software for the Acorn BBC B. It was fun, and threw me in the deep end of dealing with customers and users. I ran a BBS, on a “Ringback” service on my parents’ phone line. I squeezed the code into about 25k of RAM, playing lots of memory tricks. I hacked up old 1200/75 baud modems. We had backdoors for friends (the cassette tape relay), and trapdoors for abusers. I ran a little business (XFS) with Dan Mills and Chris England, and it was OK.

My two favourite functionalities in XFS were “gatewaying”, which allowed us to create nested microsites within the main site (sub-domains anyone?); and mail exchanging where many of the boards running XFS would dial each other up and exchange mail with each other (SMTP?!) twice a night. One day I’ll suck the XFS source code off a 3.5″ disk (on one of my existing Arcs) and give myself a good solid dose of nostalgia and sit there rocking gently and raging at today’s bloatware. 25k of RAM.

Simple code is beautiful code; simple code is functional code; simple code is reliable and easy to maintain. Maybe by over-extending the object/property/method model, and relying so much on libraries and modules, we’ve lost sight of that simplicity?