I’ve started to get “into” Twitter, the micro-blogging site, in the last month or so. One trend that I picked up on is that of “hashtags” where you put a hash (pound) symbol followed by a word somewhere in your message. This makes is searchable. The most recent that I’ve participated in is #firstmac, for which my contribution was:

A white iBook G3, paid extra to get the 600Mhz version with the faster bus speed and an impossible-to-use-it -all 384Mb of memory

• Withnail tourism – Must head up to the lakes, or at the very least dig out my DVD.
• Bush Street Renamed Obama Street in San Francisco – Welcome to the White House, President Obama!
• Bush: ‘Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over’ – On the eve of Obama’s inauguration it’s instructive to look back to Bush’s 2001 speech…

• 6 days to stop MPs concealing their expenses – I’m appalled that they’re trying to stop the public finding out how they’re spending our money! How about some accountability?
• Yummy 2.0 Quick Overview – New version of my iPhone delicious.com client. Lots of new features, including a web preview, integration with various Twitter clients, view by tag, improved search, streamlined bookmark editing… the list goes on!
• If you’ve nothing to hide… – Double standards from MPs. Who’d have thought?

A Tibetan monk spends a lot of his time meditating. Unfortunately I didn’t get a good picture of one so this weeks PhotoFriday, “Meditation,” is a picture of the many people who meditate, pray and prostrate outside the Jokhang Temple in Lhasa, Tibet.

Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “White.” I’m entry 266.

• China’s three-horse mobile bet: Repeating America’s mistakes – “We’ve seen from the last big experiment in multiple standards that competition doesn’t always lead to more choice and lower prices. That experiment was the US – the place that leads in technology, internet and computer design, yet trails in mobile phone technology.”
• ‘Visions link’ to coffee intake – My alma mater finds a connection between coffee and hallucinations. I was saying the same thing to a pink elephant only the other day…
• Pound shop forced to close – after 99p store opens across the road – In a recession every penny counts I suppose! Not in The Onion or Newsbiscuit as you might imagine… (Via @antairgames)

This is probably the meanest article title I’ve ever written, as the “W” refers to a person, someone that I used to work with¹. The critical phrase went something like this:

“How hard can it be? It’s only a button!”

Those two, tiny sentences hide a lot. Let me explain.

I’m mainly technical. I have been in the industry for over ten years now, did a computer science degree and spent many hours when I should have been revising for my German GCSE programming my Sinclair Spectrum. This means that when someone says “It’s only a button” I instinctively cringe. I may not know the details but I’ve seen enough “simple” buttons with days worth of work behind them that I’ve learned to be cautious.

• Welcome back, Palm – “After years in a persistent vegetative state, Palm has come roaring back with a gadget that’s going to prove hard to beat in 2009.” Not sure it’s that good, but competition for Apple and RIM is always going to be a good thing.
• The UK government’s plans to retain email data and rate online content will cost too much, destroy business, liberty and must be stopped – start making placards – The title pretty much says it all (though the rest of the article is also worth reading).
• ‘No God’ campaign draws complaint – “Organisation Christian Voice has complained to the Advertising Standards Authority saying they break rules on substantiation and truthfulness.” Sometimes I read the headlines in my RSS feed and think it must be in NewsBiscuit or The Onion…

• Yummy Version 1.0.3 – New minor release of Yummy, my Delicious.com client for iPhone. Fix for something that took me two weeks to track down, an annoying edge condition I found when editing bookmarks under certain conditions and a problem that Apple rejected the original binary for.
• Apple Introduces Revolutionary New Laptop With No Keyboard – Sounds almost plausible…
• Travel time to major cities: A global map of Accessibility – Fascinating.

I recently went to a BCS talk entitled “Eight Significant Events in Computing.” In the question and answers session at the end, one attendee noted that most innovations were Western in general, from the USA in particular. There are a good number of exceptions but, okay. He continued: the result of a Capitalist system and not Communist or Fascist. Again, I’m not sure that this is entirely true.

But it was his final point that floored me: IT innovations were mostly Christian. A few confused looks made him clarify with the line, “There are no Buddhist Computer Systems.”

According to my dictionary, “Disorder,” this weeks PhotoFriday theme, means “the disruption of peaceful and law-abiding behaviour.” This image of central Hanoi in Vietnam shows locals on scooters blaring their horns (lack of peace) and zipping all over the road in a display that should be illegal even if it isn’t. There were certainly worse displays of disorder and chaos on Vietnamese roads but I value my life!