ASYLUM

* Virgin Media Want To Charge Three Times For Each Piece Of Data

I have a radical idea for Internet Service Providers. Here it is:

You provide internet service, and we pay for it.

And that's it.

Unfortunately, Virgin Media aren't happy with this arrangement.

No, they want to charge firstly their customers, for receiving data from the Internet. Then, they want to charge the Internet, for sending data to their customers. Finally, they want to charge marketing companies to spy on everything Virgin's customers and the Internet say to each other.

Apparently, they're missing the point that an Internet Service Provider is paid to provide an Internet service, not a Disney service or a BBC service or whoever-they've-managed-to-extort-money-from service. They just see a huge field of customers and think "MINE!"

I don't think this "customers as fungible resource to be mercilessly exploited" business model goes far enough. I have a new business opportunity to offer Virgin:

Virgin Tenancy

In this exciting new entrepreneurial exploit, Virgin rent homes of "up to" 8 rooms to the 18-35 demographic. These customers pay the same rent as anyone else, although their houses may not actually have 8 rooms.

Then, Virgin charges IKEA, Habitat, John Lewis, Argos, Homebase and others "access fees" for permission to install their furniture in their customers homes. Now, the furniture isn't actually installed or paid for out of these fees, you understand — the customers still have to go to the store and buy and pay for their furniture like anyone else. It's just that if IKEA or whoever hasn't paid Virgin the "access fees", Virgin will install those tire-shredding devices on the customer's street, so their furniture won't get delivered for 6 months — and who's going to sleep on an inflatable mattress for that long?

Finally, Virgin riddles the house with CCTV cameras, and sells the footage on their pay-per-view channels. They claim it won't violate privacy, because they don't attach the customers' name or address to the footage, just a special number. Of course, there's an audio feed, so if someone happens to address you by name — or people just recognise you — well, tough luck.

What do you mean, you wouldn't live in a house like that? Get with the program! This Housing Neutrality thing is a load of bollocks!

* Daily Dystopia

Here's something that should be outright banned: Evil Holosonic audio advertising.

What's that? "Holosonic" audio is like a spotlight, a tightly-focused 'beam' of sound. Outside of the beam, all is quiet. Inside, you pick up the audio. Apparently, it works by emitting ultrasound, too high-pitched for humans to hear — tho perhaps driving dogs insane — but as it travels through the air, tiny distortions and interference patterns cause lower-frequency, audible-to-humans sound to be given off.

Now, this is potentially cool technology: the textbook Worthy Example is of a museum, where you can listen to a recorded curator describing the exhibit you're looking at without carrying around a headset (that can break, have its batteries run out, etc). The audiobeam would only extend to a small area around each piece, so the room would be quiet and the recordings would not clash with each other.

With my interaction-design hat on, I'd love to use this tech to design, say, a haunted-house ride or other fun game-like experiences.

But using it for advertising? That shit is fucking evil. I'm sorry, but there you have it: it just is. It's putting voices in your head and that's just not acceptable. They try to spin the hell out of it in the article I linked to, claiming it's actually a good thing, claiming it "reduces noise pollution":

"If you set up a loudspeaker on the top of a building, everybody's going to hear that noise. But if you're only directing that sound to a specific viewer, you're never going to hear a neighbor complaint from street vendors or pedestrians. The whole idea is to spare other people." — Joe Pompei, president and founder of Holosonics

This is, of course, a completely bogus argument, firstly because if you set up loudspeakers like that, at least round here, you'd get your ass kicked by the local council's Noise Abatement team; secondly, because a loudspeaker is part of the environmental soundscape, it's directional, you instinctively turn your head to identify its origin, whereas the holosonic audio is secretly beamed into your goddamn skull and you don't know where from. And thirdly, it's an intrusion into your personal space, time and thoughts even more obnoxious than telemarketing, which is a sick kind of impressive, really.

* The Eyes Have It

So, there're some home-made cookies on our counter, kept in an old plastic margarine container. It's "Vitalite" brand, which I don't use myself, but I didn't make the cookies. I mention this because I have their ancient, ancient advertising jingle stuck in my head. You may remember it, a sort of Carribean-sounding "Ayyyyy-Ohhhh-Vi-ta-lite!" thing. Pretty weak. But two things made it slightly creepy:

• It's been stuck in my head for days, but I only just this minute put together that it went through my head every time I made a cup of tea, and then registered the margarine container; but clearly I'd been noticing it subliminally all week long.

• Instead of the actual advertising jingle's words, what goes through my head is: "Ayyyyy-Ohhhh-The-Hills-Have-Eyes"

* The Weak Misanthropic Principle

So, it took nearly one whole month from subtards-kicking-my-door-in to having a replacement door that is actually worthy of the name, in that it has things like waterproofing applied, a window in the frame instead of cardboard and somewhere to push letters through, short of asking the postie to, say, punch through the cardboard. And I visited the dentist yesterday, on the same day that builders moved into the flat upstairs and started committing violence to kitchen units, from 7am to 6pm.

So while I'm feeling misanthropic:

SPACE PRISON, as bleak and horrible a book as you'll find in science fiction. Four thousand humans are dropped on a high-gravity planet, rejected by a slaving alien invasion force. One thousand one hundred of them die during the first night. And it really doesn't get any more cheerful from there. Tom Godwin, on almost every page, says to the reader, "oh, you liked this character? He falls off a mountain now. That one? Dies of exposure. This one? Eaten by goats. That one? Stabbed into meaty chunks by psychotic unicorns." And on and on. I must have read that book twenty times. — Warren Ellis

* So far...

Well, I've been using it for a few days now, and it's working great. Although I can't comment on the actual, you know, telephony as I have yet to make a single phone call on it (at least in part because my phone number won't get ported until next week). On the other hand, for mobile email, internet access and personal organiser tasks, it rocks.

It's mostly the device I've been waiting a decade for.

I used to have a Palm Pilot. Two, actually, over the years. I used to really like that thing. I liked its philosophy — simplicity and pragmatism. No faffing around managing applications or poking through deeply nested UI for basic tasks: You just tapped Calendar, or Notes or whatever, and got on with it. Done? Just tap onto your next task. No saving or quitting necessary.

But Palm stalled. Languished. They never really brought the OS forward. The digitiser on my second Pilot was notoriously unreliable. And there was no real connectivity. For a while, I drooled after the Treo, but it took forever to be released in the UK, was hideously expensive (much more than the iPhone is now), suffered from 'awkward convergence device' syndrome, and there was no decent internet-access plan available over here — paying big money for tiny bandwidth? No thanks.

iPhone is, in most respects, as good an organiser as my Palm Pilot was. Just tap straight through to whatever you need. No faff. It's hard to make a direct judgement on entering text, but it feels quicker and more reliable than the Palm: I suspect screen size and sheer processing speed have a lot to do with this, and the large-format custom controls. There was a real tendency towards stylus hunt-and-peck on the Palm's dinky screen.

As a result, I feel happier with the touch-keyboard than I did with the Palm (either "Graffiti" or on-screen keyboard). If, as widely anticipated, Apple add features to synchronise notes and to-do entries with those in Leopard Mail, it'll be pure gold.

On top of that, it has the best mobile email I've used and, most importantly, always-on unlimited internet access FTW. Now, I haven't used Blackberry email. A lot of people say Blackberry's mobile mail is better than that on the iPhone. Possibly, it is, but noone's articulated to me how or why, yet. I see people with Blackberries on the train and can't imagine using something with such a poor screen and awkward-looking controlls for serious reading and replying, and Apple Mail mostly meets my requirements (it needs a "don't load images" option, and better replying/quoting options, but nothing devastating).

And it doesn't require you to install Blackberry server stuff — those things are only suitable for corporations, whereas my iPhone logs directly into my home computer, keeping everything in sync with my regular mail. This is what I like most about how my email works: Apple Mail on my desktop or laptop Macs, pine over ssh, and iPhone Mail, all play nicely together — flagged-important, read and replied message marks keep in sync; I can even start typing up a reply on one, postpone it, and continue it later on any of the others. None of this "Oh, I sent that on the phone so I don't have a record of it" nonsense or "I read that already on the laptop but it's showing up unread on the phone". Nope. It works.

Downsides, to be fair: Although the browser is "tabbed", it seems to "pause" a tab when you switch to another, so you can't load documents in the background. There's no copy-paste. I already mentioned the weak reply/quote. And the notes/todo syncing isn't in place yet.

* Fire Walk With Me

So, yesterday lunchtime, I got The Black Lodge activated. It turns out to have been a nice fun combination-of-three-organisations snafu: My hypersensitive bank had panicked (bug #1) and tagged my credit card with a fraud alert, which just needed me to ring up their fraud dept to clear it. But they rang my work number and left voicemail. Late on friday night — always a great time to get through to an office worker (bug #2) :P But I rang their customer services on Sunday and they had no idea anything was wrong! Again: Left hand, meet right (bug #3).

So, my payment was being bounced until I got into work on monday morning, got the voicemails and got it straightened out. But in the meantime, iTunes' registration system didn't actually tell me that's why it couldn't proceed (bug #4). No error messages (thus my sardonic screenshot below) or information. Not only that, O2 had no idea either (bug #5), and claimed their "engineers are working on it" and that the faults department would get back to me "within 24 hours". Sure — 24 hours after I fixed it myself, about 60 hours after it first went wrong (bug #6).

So in conclusion, it all works great as long as nothing goes wrong, at which point all hell breaks loose because none of the organisations involved seem to know what happens or who to ask.

Enough whingeing. Some reflections on other iPhone-related matters...

On The Retail Experience

Wow, that was frightening.

I didn't think they'd try and pull the whole whooping-and-clapping routine in the UK stores. It isn't really in our DNA (at least, for things that don't involve superstars). And, my old phone has been getting increasingly dysfunctional as I held on for the iPhone, because I knew that's what I wanted to upgrade to, and didn't want to replace the old one twice. But with the controls gradually seizing up, it was getting tricky.

So I wanted to get the iPhone up and running right away (ah, the irony), to replace the failing one, and to that end I went to the launch at the Regents Street Apple Store.

The queue was hugely long, but actually very fast-moving, and well-managed by the friendly event staff. The only difficulty was spotting where to go, because the path was obscured by hundreds of non-purchasing rubberneckers blocking the way as they performed the now-traditional British ritual of holding their own cameraphones aloft to take grainy snaps of things they can't actually see themselves through the forest of heads and waving cameraphones.

So the queue went round several corners and streets to the bank on Cavendish Square. But once inside the store, it diverged into multiple queues split across floors. Snaking around, then up the stairs, then round a complete circuit of the top deck of the store before being directed to a makeshift checkout where the Genius Bar used to be. Swipey-card, tappy-pin, grabby-phone, and flee, flee! Because the place was insane!

See, I never put much credence in The Cult Of Mac — sure, there are plenty of MacHuggers, but I tend to put that down to less-computer-literate people being affectionate for a device that gives them the tools they need without being frightening or obstreperous. It's sort of like good-cop bad-cop.

But with rows of Apple employees whooping it up, doing "iPhone! iPhone! iPhone!" chants, cheering and clapping customers on entry and exit, I couldn't help thinking of cults.

On ringtones

My old phone allowed me to put any mp3 onto it and use that as a ringtone, something I made gleeful use of with deeply obscure audio I put together myself. There has been some controversy over the iPhone ringtone situation, but it seems to have been fixed in the latest firmware: I just made an m4a file, renamed it to m4r and dropped it into the Ringtones section, and it works great.

John Gruber is perplexed by this situation, but I think it may be as simple as this: The 1.1.2 firmware is not officially released in the States. But my phone, and presumably all UK (and maybe German?) iPhones were released with 1.1.2 installed. That's about as official as it gets.

Maybe this is a region-locking thing? A concession Apple had to make with AT&T in the States, while in Europe — where, though the ringtone market is huge, being able to use your own free custom ones has also been a standard for a long time — you're free to use what you want? (The dubious looks the EU has been giving Apple over tie-in practices with the iTunes Music Store may also be related).

On the device itself

It's bloody marvellous, of course. I don't really need to reiterate that, there've been plenty of reviews already. One day all phones will be like this. Not that there isn't room for improvement, but right now it is light-years ahead of anything else.

You can willy-wave features around if you like, but it won't make a dent in the simple fact that this is an OS X computer with wireless connectivity that slips into a pocket — and a pretty good phone. Everything else is either just a phone (if it's a "feature phone"), or a lousy phone trying to play at being a computer (if it's a "smart phone"). It's not 1979 any more, technology needn't behave like it.

More later, after I've had more time with it.

* 48 Hours And Countink

Still no phone activation. Why? Because O2 can't organise their way out of a paper bag. And they want me to sign on to an 18 month contract? OK, they have a technical fault — but they have no backup plan? After all this time?

Note: The problem is not the iTunes store being too busy; it's a particular step of the activation process — I click "Continue", it says "please wait" for a couple of seconds (see screenshot on previous post) and then bumps me back to the same screen. No error messages. No you-need-to-fix-X. Just doesn't do a damn thing.

Apparently this is because of a communication problem between computers, which isn't surprising considering there's at least 4 seperate systems/organisations involved — mine, Apple's, O2's and the bank's. But by now they ought to have procedures in place to bypass all that and fill it in by hand if they have to.

On the bright side, at least as a result of all this, I have finally chosen a name for the new phone (assuming I don't return it to the shop, which I will if they don't make it work soon): "The Black Lodge"

A place of almost unimaginable power, chock full of dark forces and vicious secrets. No prayers dare enter this frightful maw [...] this hidden land of unmuffled screams and broken hearts [...] — Windom Earle

* Purgatory

20 hours after purchasing an iPhone, and my views on mopho networks are strongly confirmed.

* Months of Meh

Last couple of months have kinda sucked, with occasional exceptions. I'm hoping for better things from November.

So, I moved house, and it took weeks for me to get internet back, due to the miscellaneous incompetence of various people. I'd like to call out specifics, but as usual, companies cover their arse by blaming each other.

Anyway, after that, Scary was ill with mumps, and then I was busy, lost my debit card, and then ill myself, and then last friday some particularly stupid thieves tried to break into my house. Through the front door. By trying to kick it in. In plain view of a fairly busy bus-stop. Needless to say, they didn't have time to get in. :P But now there's a lump of metal bolted across my door and a bill for over a hundred quid for the fitting of said lump of metal. I'm not sure how that's legal.

Oh, and work upheavals — the project I've been working on for the past year has been 'put on the back burner' because it's too similar to another project — a fact I pointed out two years ago, but was roundly ignored.

So now I'm on a new project. That's very similar to the old one. But more broken.

Some fun stuff

Went to see some people Scary knows doing improv comedy; went to the zoo; finally got my security deposit back from estate agents; acquired new geeky toys; took some time off work; played Portal; had a small but pleasant housewarming; and in general I really like the new place... it's quieter, warmer and easier to keep clean than anywhere else I've lived in London.

Other random news and facts:

• The Thai place we used to go for lunch was cordoned off by police the other week after burnt chillies caused a chemical-weapons scare.

• Until the exchange rates change dramatically, the US currency shall henceforth be known as the LOLlar.

* Of sounds, tubes and Fibonacci juice

Three things:

Yesterday evening, we went to see The Gas Organ, which is a sort of pipe organ created by shoving the end of a lit propane torch into a long perspex pipe. Several of these, plus the radio controller from a model aeroplane, gives you a kind of musical instrument. Well, in theory — musically, I don't think it really worked. As a pleasing device that makes a honking great noise, it was pretty successful.

Later that night, I was drinking some juice at Chez Scary, and noticed the text on the back of the carton included a blackboard on which was the functional definition of the Fibonacci sequence. Purely for pineapple-related reasons, you understand.

Remember this story about a bubble lamp? It's the second ever post on this blog. Today, sitting at my desk at work, I overheard someone recounting the story of it to incredulous colleagues, completely unaware that one of the guys responsible was sitting a row or two across.