Googled by Ken Auletta

I have been struggling through this book for quite some time. Had I read the reviews, I probably would not have bothered to buy it, but I had a half price voucher so I just got it as a book about Google, which sounded good.

The prose is dull, the book is badly edited, there are not even photos, the book uses Google to talk about new media, but is not particularly insightful. This is a book by someone who earns his money in old media, and it shows.

The book does get slightly better in the second half, but I would advise people to avoid this, it is a real clunker of a book.

Small Eco-Houses

This is one of those Taschen published books with a lot of pictures and parallel text in English, French and German. All told it only took about an hour to read, so there is not a lot of text, and frankly the text is not up to much either. However that is hardly the point of the book. It is a resource of photos of some aspirational or not so aspirational houses with an environmentally friendly element. However this is environmental friendliness with concrete, larch cladding and lots of glass walls, so nice to look at but not a lot of chickens scrabbling around strawbale walls.

Worth a look and really not very expensive for what it is. You can always have a look through it and dream of being able to afford one of these houses.

rambling blog entry

Just a rambling blog entry.

Workwise, things are really busy, but in that steady sort of way, where you work away, and make decent enough progress but certainly never run out of stuff to do. I'm still enjoying the new job, it is challenging, and makes you think, but that is good. I really like the people I am working with, so I'm keen to avoid getting too stressed and snarky and falling out with them.

I have accumulated a massive amount of annual leave and excess hours, so the current plan is to take three weeks leave. Nothing much planned, but just vegging out, catching up on some DIY, and some family time, sounds good. It may be necessary to eat into the leave, either heading in to work if anything super urgent appears, or family stuff, but the principle of me not being there for a few weeks seems to have been accepted. It will be the longest chunk of leave I have taken in years!

Computer wise, the new iPad is proving a big hit. I am hankering after a new laptop myself, my current white MacBook with only 80Gig of hard drive is a bit pokey. On the one hand I am tempted by something more powerful, on the other I might like a bigger screen, on the other I am tempted by a solid state drive so I can use it with impunity when travelling. However I really don't want to go above £1k for a laptop, so I'm not sure what I'll do. The smart thing to do might just be to get an iPod classic for watching the TED talks on the train, and get a MacBook in a year or two. I don't like the idea of not having FireWire but it is not worth paying hundreds extra just to get it.

The rest of the family have all upgraded their phones, but I like my old flip open phone and all I use it for is phoning, so apart from the battery running out every other day, there is nothing that bad about what I have now.

I have recently moved onto the paid version of Evernote, so I am trying to get my head round how it works and make better use of it. No substitute for actually using the thing of course.

Not much else being going on lately. Took eldest daughter in to work with me for a day, a few weeks ago. I was keen to show that I did not just sit at an office desk all day, so I took her to an event we were running. A lot of interesting people there, so some talks, and workshops, with a bit of networking thrown in. Probably useful for her to see me in a different environment, though her take on my networking was that I just spoke to all the pretty girls! Showed her our press room when we got back to the office, and she had a chat with a comms officer I've worked with on stuff before, so a pretty good day for her. Of course mostly I do just sit in the office, but if something interesting comes up, I'll see if I can bring her in again. It does make you look at your own day, and work, differently if you are showing it to a member of your family. I do actually like my job, and I think that I am pretty good at it!

The weather has gone to a perpetual cloudy/rain on google weather now. Seldom quite as alarming as the forecast, but I was rushing this weekend to get the grass mowed, and fill up the brown recycling bin with hedge trimmings before it gets emptied. There are so many shrubs and hedges, that I really cannot afford to miss a fortnightly uplift. In terms of harvesting we had a bumper redcurrent crop, what a useful fruit bush, had some gooseberries already, strawberries been good, but fading now. The red onions should be ready soon, and the courgettes are currently flowering so the courgettes should be ready soon. I've planted out some curly Kale. The apple trees are all fuller than I have ever seen them before. While the damson might manage a single damson this year, another record crop! Fruit trees and bushes just seem to get steadily better year on year, the first few years don't really tell you anything.

I just feel like one last push on with work stuff, and then flop into a well deserved rest.

our new iPad

I've not been doing many blogs lately, and those that I have done have mostly been book reviews.

Got my daughter an iPad a while ago, I had pre-ordered one, and then the official release date came and went, and went a bit more. My hopes were significantly raised when I heard that the iPad had been dispatched from the factory, until I realised that the factory was in China and the iPad would still take an age to arrive.

But eventually it did turn up, one daughter had guessed that we had ordered one, but the other, the recipient, had not. So it was a huge surprise for her. There was a pleasant, oohhhh factor as you opened up the box, and setting it up, was as simple as connecting it to iTunes.

We have all had a little play with it, but it is essentially my daughter's, so she has it set up with her stuff and uses it as she wants to.

I have had a go with The Elements, which is pretty impressive, but overpriced. The rest of the family seem to enjoy Angry Birds and Labyrinth.

When it comes to web browsing it seems pretty unsatisfactory to me. My finger is too fat to work on a crowded menu, and most websites seem really badly laid out for the iPad. Either the menus are too small, or you keep on going down cul-de-sacs, and retracing your steps. I find web-browsing on my laptop a far more compelling waste of time.

However, it should be easy enough for websites to be reconfigured with iPad friendly versions, and some of this is just down my inbuilt preference for whatever I am familiar with.

If I did have my own iPad, then I would probably use it for watching TED Talks on my commute, and anything else that did not need much typing. I don't see it replacing a desktop computer or a laptop, it is just a new category of device, and more importantly a new way to consume media.

Of course I don't have my own iPad, my daughter does, and she is virtually inseparable from it. It is on the go all day long. So it is just as well you get a day's worth of charge with the battery, because it is well used every day.

If the iPad cost could come down by half, then they would become totally ubiquitous. It is attractive, easy to use, and can only get more useful.