Obsolete

Last weekend, our tablet crashed. I was in the middle of browsing a webpage of little importance, when the screen froze and the tablet refused to comply with any further swiping-based instructions.

Fiddling about with words

Over the last two years, I wrote an awful lot of words about the 23 Bond films that had been made up until the end of 2012. (We don't count the David Niven Casino Royale, or Never Say Never Again, because they were, well, shit.) Inspired by Jon Millward's Deep Inside, a statistical analysis of porn stars, I thought I'd do some data mining of my own. Unfortunately, I'm still not very familiar with R, that programmatic workbench beloved of statisticians, so to get my feet wet I thought I'd start by analysing and displaying the frequency of different words in what I wrote. And here's what you get:

One of the lucky ones: Garmin and superstitions

It's bad luck to be superstitious, but I'm a Sagittarean, so I've read that doesn't affect me. Still, if like Edison you can make yourself luckier by working harder, perhaps the luckier you get, the more you can take it easy.

I always wear the same t-shirt when I take a flight with my wife. I always wore the same trousers when I did stand up comedy in Hong Kong. If I have to make a speech I always write it on my hand and then never look at it. I have to have a particular pair of shorts when I do my early morning Sunday run.

If I don't do these things, the world has a habit of screwing with my plans. It's not that I think they're capable of altering my fate, but the absence of them makes it easier for mistakes to happen. If I have a different pair of shorts, I might not remember to take my keys with me because I won't remember to check they're in that particular pocket. If I don't write things down, I'll forget them. If I'm trying to decide which pair of trousers I'm going to wear, I'm devoting scant mental resource to something that isn't essential to making people laugh.

Well, I've had people laugh at my clothes, but those chuckles are few, far between and undeserved.

These habits-cum-totems of good fortune have an important role to play. They allow you to concentrate on what's important. If you know you're wearing your lucky socks, you can stop worrying about laundry and think about how you're going to impress people. If you've tied your shoelaces and undone them and tied them again you know they're not going to come undone. Just like Obama's famous lack of variety in suits: by removing the need to make a decision about something trivial, you can concentrate on deciding important things.

Mosquitoes

Another day at work, at the end of which I was tearful, exhaustion making my emotions ragged and confusing. I packed up, went for dinner and then bought a copy of the New Yorker at the bookstore down the street.

There was a fascinating article about transgenic mosquitoes. A laboratory in Oxford has been modifying the genes of mosquitoes so they die in the absence of tetracycline; they then release the mosquitoes to breed. Since their descendents don't have any tetracycline, the kill-gene kicks in and they die. Because all the unmodified mosquitoes have bred with the modified ones, the population can die off in just a few generations.

Long day

Today was another long day. I got up at six, jogged slowly round the block and then ran up the hill away from the freeway through Bellevue. The hills in Bellevue are a bit bigger than the ones in Singapore, and having to do six repetitions of this was tough. By the fifth time up the hill, I was feeling beaten, and on the sixth my legs felt empty, devoid of strength. I got to the top of the hill but I was a busted flush; I trundled back down the hill, did another lap of the block to warm down, and then went and cleaned myself up for the day.

I know that running up hills is good for me, but it's hard that they have to be so hard. I suppose it woke me up.

Smashing

This has not been a good weekend for sleep. I got up early for a run yesterday and deprived myself of a lie-in, and felt devoid of energy. Today I did the same, but instead of going back to sleep after I'd got home, as any sensible person would, I lost two hours of my life keying my old runs into Smashrun.

Don't buy a Blackberry

I've had a Blackberry for the last four years, and I suppose I've been quite loyal. Before I had one, I was intensely sceptical. Partly because as a good European chauvinist, I knew no North American company could make phones as good as Nokia or Ericsson. And partly because the idea of a device that enabled you to be emailed wherever you were struck me as a horrible chain to be dragging around with you.

Then I got a Blackberry, and discovered that it also allowed you to delete emails while you were sat on the toilet, which was a boon to efficiency, as I could get to work with an inbox clear of ephemera. And most of the emails were full of shi- oh, better not say it.

Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7

One thing you can say for the Koreans, they certainly know how to give things names, as I remarked the other night to my wife as we sat watching our Samsung LA37B53 television. Admittedly, iPad is quite a ridiculous and charmless name too, but I keep thinking I must be missing some Korean allusion with the word 'tab'. This is either a synonym for 'cigarette' if you're from the Grim North of England, or a small bit of cardboard sticking out the side of a box. Hardly redolent of a brave new world of technology.

Waterfall charts in Business Objects Webi

I spent a few hours fighting with Business Objects yesterday, trying to make a waterfall chart.

Waterfall charts are beloved of marketing types and people who want to look at the impact of several different factors on sales. They look like this:

For my hypothetical wild animal shop, I can see that there's been a big contribution from sales of aardvarks, whereas bears and cattle are bringing results down.

Quiet down

Three years ago I was hanging around Heathrow airport with nothing better to do, so I paid for a pair of Sennheiser noise-cancelling headphones and had a blissfully quiet flight to Hong Kong.

I'm still not sure if that means we're now officially in The Future, or just in a 1970s version, because we've known about acoustic cancellation for years (I learned about it as a callow youth in my second or third year at secondary school) but it seemed to take forever for the technology to be implemented in a way that didn't require the consumer to carry around two lead acid batteries, an oscilloscope, three rheostats and a condenser microphone. So that's progress, I guess.

The strange smell of Google Sites

As I walked through Tin Hau tonight, the air carried a smell that combined electrical charge with motor oil, precisely the same as you'd get if you sniffed a Hornby 00 model train.

The Automatic Comedian

Ladies and gentleman, after the best part of a year, I'm proud to present ... The Automatic Comedian ! Unflappable, incomprehensible, and most importantly nigh-on indestructible, the Automatic Comedian will continue to yell things at you that you think you should be able to understand, long after you've struggled out of a sweaty, stinky comedy club and trundled all the way home to weep into your keyboard, distraught at your failure to employ an effective heckle.

The Boy Who Considered Buying A Kindle

I went to the gym today, which seems to be my unimaginative way to commemorate the start of the week; having done some exercise, I'm then either too complacent or too exhausted to contemplate returning for another week.

Gradually, I'm beginning to recognise some of the people there: there's a resolute old duffer who spends all his time on the stepmaster, some angry looking chap sprinting on the treadmill, and a succession of people who row for a bit then go away to do something else. I wonder if anyone recognises me. Maybe for somebody I'm that bloke who perspires too much while looking very bloody cross. I guess it's an image of a sort.

Smuggling iPads

After my late night panic over the computer, adrenalin coursing through my veins, I couldn't sleep until 2am, which meant that today I was jaded with every bit of my existence.  It could have been worse, though. I could have been one of the 14 Hong Kongers arrested on Monday for smuggling.

For smuggling iPads into Shenzhen.