A few months back we holidayed in Australia. Part of this was a drive from Melbourne to Sydney with 3 overnight stays en route. Whereas the rest of the holiday was all pre-booked, we picked and booked the accommodation for these nights as we went along.

The White House stood out in all the guides we picked up. Their website is best reached at www.whitehouseguesthouse.com - their original .com.au address was blocked from the tourist centre computer because it starts the same as a porn site!

We went for the “Luxury Spa Room”, although it was only about £50 for the night - just over £10 more than a normal room - and the whole three days had come in well under budget. This turned out to be a cabin in the grounds with a lovely spa bath that comfortably fitted two. We went in winter; I’d imagine that booking in advance would be needed for a summer trip.

The whole place had real character, but what makes this my favourite hotel/motel/guesthouse night of 2007 was the combination of facilities and unobtrusive staff.

We ended up nattering with the proprietor over breakfast the next morning for quite a while, meaning the final leg of the drive wasn’t as leisurely as it could have been, but it wasn’t time wasted.

As you may know, an iPod touch is an iPhone without the phone parts. But as the first generation iPhone misses several facilities I expect to have on a modern phone, I wasn’t willing to go down the total convergence route just yet.

Instead, the device that my iPod primarily replaced was my PSP. Obviously the PSP was better for games, but it more often justified space in my bag for the other features - photo viewer, video player, and most important of all the wifi web browser. All these are bettered by the iPod touch.

My absolute favourite feature of the Touch has to be the Mobile Safari browser. It is the main reason I bought one. I was totally in the market for a handheld web tablet. I was considering the Sony Ericsson P1 for wifi web browsing. Then I saw Steve Jobs introduce the iPod touch. I was sold.

A beautiful large screen that can be held portrait or landscape, displaying web pages that can be scrolled, zoomed and navigated by touching the screen? That renders websites properly with the only significant omission being Flash? In a lovely thin black device that could fit in your shirt pocket? That isn’t Windows? How could I not be sold on this?

I was not disappointed. Browsing the web is a joy. Although the browser makes it easy to read any size of website by allowing single tap zooming to a particular column or section, a number of websites have developed versions tailored for the iPhone/touch interface making things even more joyous. Apple’s devices just seem to have got more people motivated to great work than the longer established Windows Mobile devices. Perhaps it’s easier to convince bosses that the time is well spent if the target device is all over the news. Perhaps it’s just easier to develop for Mobile Safari. Perhaps more web developers own iPhones and iPod touches themselves. Whatever the reasons, the net result is that I can check Facebook and Google Reader in bed - and link through to “normal” websites if needbe.

The more traditional iPod features were a secondary consideration, but it quickly became my preferred mobile music source. I’m not entirely happy with the shuffle or the emphasis on albums, but syncing podcasts and throwing music at via iTunes is better than I’d feared. The lack of buttons makes changing track whilst on the move a matter of getting it out of the protective sock and sliding various things around with my finger - a problem solved by buying a headphone remote with play/pause, back/next, volume up/down buttons.

Indeed, I have almost got to the stage where the accessories are worth more than the iPod itself. iSocks, chargers, TV cable, protective film, speakers, remote, The Cloud subscription… And still there’s more to tempt me. In a few years I’ll probably have an iPod dock of some sort in every room. I remember being mildly amazed when first put my iPod touch in my mother’s dock that it just worked. Of course, it would be better if everything shared a connector that was more universal and open, but the reality is the ubiquity of iPods and iPod compatible devices offers a significant advantage over other music players.

Even taking into account the “total cost of ownership”, it’s still one of the greatest things I have ever purchased. Being without it is not unlike someone from Lyra’s world being separated from their daemon. Like the daemon of a child, it is constantly changing form. Third-party applications officially become available in the next few months. I already have my device “jailbroken” to allow such things now, making the device ever more useful and entertaining. For the benefit of my iPhone and iPod touch owning friends and readers I will be highlighting the best of these in 2008. For now, as I look back there is no doubt that the iPod touch is the best object I’ve bought in 2007 - if not my entire life.

Tomorrow - best overnight hotel stay of the year.

I know what you’re thinking. Second series of News Knight?

That show was almost entirely based on the premise that they got a Sir (Knight, geddit??) to awkwardly read from auto-cue things that he was unlikely to say off-the-cuff - “fat white bastard” being the most famous example. So, they need a beknighted guy who has time on his hands and isn’t known for his sense of humour or his ability to present in a non-wooden manner.

My money’s on Sir Menzies Campbell.

It’s actually one of the few LJ posts I reposted here, as I suspected I may want to refer to it again.

I am at some point soon going to get my arse in gear and start posting more regularly on this personal blog site. Upcoming topics include the iPod touch, Billie Piper, Board Game Geek, sauna etiquette, some belated musings on my recent trip to Australia. And why Facebook is like High School Musical. So add me to your RSS reader now! Or bookmark me, whatever suits you.

I believe this show needs work if it is to have the success of Any Answers? I would not be surprised if there are more complaints about the show than contributions.

That’s from my Open Directory listing and is somewhat dated. At the present moment, there are no photographs and no mention of Buffy or REM. And I’m not even really a Mancunian, if we’re being picky.

I promise to resolve this as soon as possible with an article on Buffy The Vampire Slayer, an article on R.E.M. and the introduction of some photographs. In the meantime, this article exists to be found by anyone searching for these things. If you’d like these musings sooner, chivvy me along in the comments.

My previous framework, MODx, was great and all, but over time I realised that practically everything I needed from a personal site could be fulfilled by a blog. While there are some great blog solutions for MODx, they are largely just mimicking the features of other systems in what can be quite convoluted ways. I tried WordPress on another domain and quickly grew to like it. So here we are. Powered by WordPress.

I feel slightly unfaithful, having been involved with MODx, but I’m not walking away from that system entirely and look forward to the new versions in the pipeline. I may very well switch back in a year’s time.

One of the things I liked about WP is that there are both Posts and Pages, but the Pages system is a little disappointing. First, the search doesn’t search pages, it just searches blog posts. Second, although you can customise the format of Post urls, there’s no equivalent facility for Pages. This means that while you can have /year/postname.html, you are stuck with /pagename. There are a bunch of posts about this in the support forum pre-dating 2.2 but still no change. I have a handful of pages that have reasonable PageRank and I’d like to keep the exact same URL. I was able to do so when I moved from static pages to MODx, so I really want to be able to do so with WordPress. What made it worse was you can’t just set the pagename as ‘hello.html’ because it automatically strips out the dot. So my first hack to WP code was to let dots through into the page name. Problem solved.

That said, many pages are being migrated to backdated blog posts - partly to solve the search problem, and partly to make it clear how dated some text is.

A behavioural switch

With my site becoming a straight-forward blog, what is to happen to my LiveJournal? Well, the change there is subtle. LJ will be primarily ephemeral, conversational posts, but above all it’s social, addressing an audience of people I know. It will be a lot more “friends-only”. I may bounce off ideas there which I later write up for a longer post here. I will cross-link to key posts. Articles here will be aimed at people stumbling across the site, simply because there’s more people I don’t know than people I do. As I haven’t actually written many long public articles on LJ for a while, for most people this will probably seem like I’m publishing additional stuff rather than moving stuff.

What is to happen to posts on forums etc? They’ll continue, but I’m likely to start making shorter forum posts and link to longer responses here.

BBC1 Controller Peter Fincham must go, or at least be prevented from speaking to journalists.

It is one thing to show two scenes in the wrong order. It is entirely another to actually say “Annie Leibovitz gets it slightly wrong and the Queen walks out in a huff” to a room full of journos.

But for me, his biggest crime was his “announcement” that Friar Tuck should be in Series 2 of Robin Hood and that Matt Lucas should play the part. Don’t worry - this isn’t happening.

A report in the Sun (which was picked up by Digital Spy) quoted Peter saying this week “I have no idea what happened — I thought it would be fun to have Friar Tuck. I think we need an inquiry. They have slightly left me high and dry - I announced it and it’s not happening. I suppose it just shows you the limits to my powers as BBC1 boss.”

On first read, I assumed that this was tongue-in-cheek. It is possible to read it in a self-deprecating sarcastic tone. But having seen him on TV, he looks the type to have said that and meant it. Read that quote back in the voice of Bertie Wooster. Then dial down the likeability. That’s Peter Fincham. He quite possibly genuinely wants an inquiry into why he can’t unilaterally force Poochie onto a show’s creative team.

The only way he could redeem himself now would be for him to not cock up the Neighbours replacement. I do hope he (and whoever fills the Daytime vacancy) does use River City in the reshuffle, even if it does need subtitles at times.

Thankfully, Matt Lucas is in any event too busy making Little America etc to play Tuck. A sketch show star famous for playing a catchphrase-spouting chav? As a regular character in a Saturday family adventure-drama series? That would be a *terrible* idea.

Apprentice reject Syed Ahmed is bothered about the reuse of towels in gyms. On the one hand a lot of energy and chemicals are used cleaning them, and on the other towels may still contain bacteria from up someone else’s bum. (Syed exudes bullshit 24/7, so it’s unsurprising he’s concerned.)

So he “invented” a hygenic, environmentally friendly “body-drier”. In fact, he hasn’t stopped inventing - he adds new features and benefits to it every time he talks to someone. By the end of the Sky One programme “Syed Ahmed - Hot Air”, it had a huge list of features - one or two of which were actually working.

Of course, he’s not the first to invent a body drier. Within minutes of the show starting, he’d found that there are 3 outfits selling them in the UK, so he went to try one out at a pool in London. It’s about the size of one of those stand-up tanning cabinets. He complained it’s not sexy. It takes “exactly 5 minutes going on for 6 minutes”, and at the end of it he’s still a bit damp - and his shorts are still soaking wet. It isn’t mentioned that people rarely towel-dry their swimming shorts, nor that there’s a perfectly good cossie dryer in many gyms. Nor is it mentioned that this “non-sexy” body-drier has a coin slot.

Still, he’s convinced that he can make something sexier, faster and better with an R&D & marketing budget of £20k. Whether that’s the exact amount that Sky paid him for the show is not stated.

There are people who point out that he needs to worry about electrocuting people, and that the electricity required would run a small factory. But he manages to get people to design some bits. There’s a shift in tone as Syed starts to try and raise funds as after two weeks it becomes apparent that £20k is not enough.

Somehow, Syed meets up with Peter, an inventor type who thinks he should “exploit the vortex technique”. The idea is that air with a spin on it will throw water over a longer path sideways. So Peter goes off to tinker while Syed interviews a number of women to be his PA. He asks each of them what they’re doing that night, and presumably this is after his split with Michelle. He picked the blonde. Plus there’s some guy that turned up from somewhere. Possibly family.

Now, there are quite a number of high-profile meetings set up, so it looks like *someone* does a good job. But all we see his PA doing is helping with a half-cocked market research questionnaire. Syed kicks it off with “Do people understand the energy consumption of a towel?” and “What would you like to use, other than towels.” “Does it dry hair as well?” asks the blonde.

How much of this reaches the actual questionnaire is unknown. Syed appeared to concentrate on elderly people who couldn’t run away quick enough, apart from one women who was clearly drawn by the idea of it giving her “a bit of a massage, like a jacuzzi.”. The blonde’s stock question was “Would you object to air being blown at you from a number of nozzles?”

Sadly we never got to see a PowerPoint slide revealing that 90% of people do not object to air being blown at them from a number of nozzles. Nor how many nozzles people find acceptable.

Now, I can understand how a ping pong ball being blown off a table by a vortex is a key stage in the development of a body drier, but I don’t know why you’d want to show a noisy ball displacer to someone that you want to help market a method of drying wet skin. When this goes badly, Syed drafted in an award-winning designer to do something on the cheap.

Some of this can be seen on the website - http://www.savortex.com/

Syed is a bullshitter. The notion that this “will change drying throughout the world” is ridiculously ambitious. “Compact, slick, fun to use” is very different to what they’ve actually achieved. The internals are copper, which “dates back to ancient times”. When questioned about his claim that “everything in it is recyclable”, as many motor parts aren’t, he resorts to the old standby “we’re learning something new every day”. So clearly he feels it’s fine to make up things he hasn’t learned. Most people he speaks to realise the level of guesswork pretty quickly.

He locks on to words that sound good - vortex, array. So we have a unique “array” drying technique.

Sure, people are interested in it, but two of the companies who take an interest are competitors. Excel, a high-profile hand-drying company, and Triton. Others, like Stelios, probably wouldn’t have shown any interest if it wasn’t for the opportunity to get an easyHotel on the telly. (An easyHotel has tiny tiny rooms and a body drier just won’t fit.)

Syed’s pricings seem to be based on What People Can Afford, which is a common model. £2k for an easyHotel, £6k for a larger hotel with a spa etc.

So what does a body dryer need to do to appeal?

Stelios is concerned “how many people care that much about the environment that they’ll take more time to do something” and says that “Branding it easy~ is not an option at this stage”.

Duncan Bannatyne blew away Syed’s reliance on Energy Trust figures that say 30% of a typical gym’s running costs are spent in energy. Rightly, he pointed out the assumption that “if it happens in London, it happens everywhere” is wrong. Duncan reckons that 80% of healthclubs in London supply members with towels. Outside London, 5%.

Syed really didn’t get this point, and talked up the inconvenience of a damp towel. But Duncan is not stupid. He’s been in business 10 years and knows the real-world towel / no towel situation. Ask for an extra £5 for towel - no chance. Offer them for free - everyone says yes. His conclusion brought it down to the simple financials. “I’m not going to spend money on a drying machine to save people who don’t have towels money on towels that I don’t give to them.”

And of course he’s right. Syed’s invention is flawed. It’s not compact enough to fit into a hotel room, so it needs to be in a communal changing area - which then limits it to gyms… and gyms either have to do towels anyway because they’re part of a hotel, or they’re competing with other city centre gyms, or they don’t do towels and are not bothered about the dampness of your gym bag.

By focusing on the energy-saving aspect, he introduced a new obstacle. If he had instead focused on the hygiene, it might have been possible to convince people to pay to use a body drier. With the electricity covered by the user, the Vortex goes from a cost to a profit centre, and might be worth finding a spare wall for.

So Syed managed to see a hotel that doesn’t have a gym, and a gym chain that don’t do towels. Duncan Bannatyne has no spare walls - they’re all covered by lockers. As he thought there was “nothing new about it”, it seems he’d already have a body drier if he thought he wanted one. I’d have to agree with him that it was “one of the worst presentations I’ve seen in a long long time.”

But was the show entertaining? Well, no. Suitably soundtracked by Ian Brown’s FEAR, Bjork’s There’s More To Life Than This, Hawkwind’s Silver Machine and Lemon Jelly’s ubiquitous Nice Weather For Ducks, the show covered 88 days in one hour. One ‘highlight’: engineer Peter got a new suit - but managed to get it wet before meeting Triton. Syed dragged him away from the workshop many times - mostly to meetings with big names, but he also got him in to ask him to speed things up. So there’s the dry voiceover bringing your attention to idiocy but not spelling it out, common to business programmes.

Engineers worked through the night to put the prototype together before a big meeting, but ran out of time to put the vortex in the body drier. A model hired by Syed demonstrated it with non-swirly air, and it seemed to work. Judging from the hand-drier (which does have the vortex), some people can’t tell whether the air is swirly or not anyway.So we’re left with something where the power consumption still needs to come down, that phs think is “not significantly different from [their] own version” but which some industry players are still positive about - if the maths work out.

I wouldn’t hold my breath.

–

Comments from the original posting

John (of Business Opportunities & Ideas), June 22nd, 2007 at 5:17pm:
Thanks for taking the time to write that it’s a brilliant and highly amusing summary of the program.
(There was also a trackback to his site.)

nev, June 24th, 2007 at 4:29am:
hello, very good account of the show, my fear is that sky when trying to show an entertaining business programme will fudge the final result so as not to end the series on a downer, ie failure in case no one tunes into the next one, which will give an unrealistic picture of business. as regards the product, small hand dryers for home use could be huge business, worldwide. remember mr dyson has gone into the commercial hand drying market and hes no mug. also has mr bannatyne ever developed a product or indeed invested in anything on dragons den?

Firefox: Different web browser; has a number of nice features.
www.mozilla.org/products/firefox

WiSi - Window Sizer: Little app that lets you set the size of any window to a specific size - handy for screenshots or checking if a website will look OK at specific resolutions.
www.fantastic-bits.de (Not a direct link; find it under Freeware: Desktop.)

AnalogX WhoIs ULTRA: Little app that checks WHOIS records for given domains.
www.analogx.com (Not a direct link; find it under Software: Network.)

Snadboy Revelation 2: Drag the target over a ***** password in software and Revelation will tell you what it is. Some more recent software (and many websites) will obfuscate further to stop this trick working, but this little app remains exceptionally useful.
www.snadboy.com

Audacity: Excellent audio editing application.
audacity.sourceforge.net

Commercial / Shareware Apps

Directory Opus: Advanced Windows file manager with Amiga roots. Does FTP. Customisable. Uses tabs. I cannot bear using Windows without it. Extra non-essential features include image resizing and a reasonable find duplicates app. Linux equivalents of earlier versions are easy to find, but I can’t see anything resembling this latest incarnation. Indeed, this app is one of the main reasons I haven’t switched. Payware, but worth it.
www.gpsoft.com.au

Tag&Rename: Bulk MP3 ID3 tag and filename editor. Shareware, but worth it.
www.softpointer.com/tr.htm