A strange place to be...George's page

A week ago my web connection went dead for two and a half days and being used to always having information on tap it was like entering a different world. And as with any crisis (even as miniscule as this) I couldn’t stop thinking how we take things for granted till we lose them. But then was losing access to the web such a horrible thing?

Well YES!
It totally throws the Web 2.0 world we live in out of the window, my media server can not fetch video and audio from the web, my Playstation 3 can not go online to download demos and other content, my computer can not access any online data…it is like being totally excluded from a society we think we have a place. Ten years ago I barely used to check my email three times a week. Nowadays I am always wired to my Gmail account through Wi-Fi. It is crazy!

But then the other day we had a conversation about simnel cake (a great banal subject) and its origins and it really helped getting instantly to Wikipedia and finding the answer on my handheld device. Sure it is possibly diminishing the need to remember any intricate details about most not day to day items but it is immensely fun having so much information on our fingertips. The novelty never really wears off. A recent Guardian article put it in more old fashioned terms…Wi-Fi is the nearest we can get in our everyday life to magic.

And I will have to second. Being able to stream video and data over the air to any room we choose is a freedom I never imagined of. But it just feels both luxurious and mystical. Maybe that is the reason that it makes it feel like a birth right it’s the fact that data access is no more something that a dull black cable brings to you, but part of the air we breathe.

Long live IEEE 802.11n

The main products was a plate and a canvas bag. Unfortunately while I was browsing books in their shop for 15 mins at least 5 people gasped at the prices of those two items. The plate is being sold for £25 and the bag for £14.50 (http://www.delawarrpavilion.com/shop/peoplewillalwaysneed.htm)
It then dawned on me that the merchandising was aspirational (with a prominent Alvar Aalto and Iittala display) but it was not acknowledging the local area and its people.
A large proportion of the population of Bexhill is pensioners that aspire to retirement by the sea. I do not think that they would have a large amount of disposable income to spend on merchandise and surely the prospect of a £25 plate must seem extortionate. To my eyes the selection in the shop was geared towards a very design conscious urbane audience.
 
This instance raises the question to who runs artistic and cultural centres around the UK and how well they know their local area. I wonder how many members of the administrative team of the Pavilion have grown up in the area or have resided for long enough to know what the locals would want. The Pavilion is a wonderful building that is clearly very popular with the local community but it seems its administration is out of touch when it comes to the commercial activities.

For a couple of months now when I arrive to Pimlico tube every morning I seem to be walking as a late-comer to a Symphonic concert. Normally I end up somewhere in the middle of the final movement of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony or like today when I landed mid flow of a Telemann quartet.

I remember when London Underground trialled playing orchestral music at Brixton Station back in 2001 with the obvious target being the various drug dealers that used to frequent directly outside the foyer of the station. They even installed speakers on the outside!

It is rather intriguing how the choice of music reflects back on Transport for London. They seem to go for a certain “unfashionable – uncool” kind of music that petty criminals would not enjoy listening to (or at least is what their advisors are telling them).

While orchestral music is in terminal decline in the public’s consciousness. And the record companies have pretty much given up on new (studio recordings, live recordings don’t really need the same amount of investment) ambitious recordings of Opera, Classical, Romantic and Baroque repertoire. Most record companies seem to be more than happy to rehash their back catalogue from the 1950s-80s into compilations. And so avoiding taking any commercial risks and giving new artists and orchestras the chance to record in studio conditions either contemporary music or give a new breath of life to older repertoire.
It is symptomatic of this decline in support that most of the large orchestras have set up their record labels (e.g. The LSO and the Hallè in Manchester) in order to disseminate their distinctive ‘sound’ out of the big record labels and their politics.

My personal response to the classical muzak, that Transport for London is putting us through, is contradictory. On one side I like listening to the music itself (the performances seems to be decent and the sound adequate) but on the other I have an uneasy feeling on the ethnic & economic profiling that has gone on in the background. Clearly TfL must be thinking that orchestral music will not appeal to the caricature of a mugger that they have in their minds (probably non-Caucasian and under 30). To me the amount of presumption that has gone on, before settling in this “novel” way to combat petty crime, creeps me out.

 
And a few links

Hallé: http://www.halle.co.uk/publishedSite/products.asp

LSO: http://lso.co.uk/buyrecordings/catalogue

http://www.urban75.org/brixton/features/brixton_tube.html

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/music/2007/08/should_music_be_used_for_crowd_control.html

Oh I do wonder sometimes, whenever there is a silly IT issue in the office and the only person around is a habitual Mac user, all they do is scratch their head and call for help.

In a way Apple's computers with no need for configuration has created a breed of computer users that have no knowledge of the working parts of their machines. Pretty much in the same way that modern cars being more reliable have removed the need for the driver to have any mechanical knowledge. But it surely must be different with computers! We use them all the time and quite a few of us run parts of our lives through them.

Some people will say that Apple's operating system is marvelous and an exemplary piece of engineering but my criticism is that mac users are technologically unintelligent as they cannot think what happens beneath the pretty interface that Apple provides them with. And that essential reality is what creates those blind followers of the cult of the Mac. As they are far too insecure to look around they will just follow like sheep Apple's latest OS update (Leopard where are you?) or run to buy the next available Apple gadget with an i prefix! Not considering what they are really buying, which most of the times is a pretty box that has limited expandability. In the real world some of Apple's gadgets would not have a commercial future, but then the consumer is seduced by great design and sleek surfaces!

A quick rundown:

The iPod, iTunes music store downloads are of a very average quality and they have a very limited amount of times they can be transfered to devices...oh and guess what they only play on the iPod! They never had the now standard FM radio or recording functionality (well not without spending another £30 for the add on module)

The iMac, no possibility for upgrading components and if something goes wrong with the computer innards the whole thing is scrapped.

The iPhone, locked down to a network with a really expensive airtime contract on top of the dear purchase price in the first place! No decent camera (2 MP? Oh come on Apple this is supposed to be a powerhouse of a phone) and Bluetooth that is only functional with Apple's own headset!

Any company that would have produced such second rate devices would have been attacked numerous times by its very customers, but somehow the cult that Apple lovers are following is depriving them of critical thoughts of their beloved brand. And queuing in the Apple Store the other week really put me in the centre of the cyclone that he cult is. All those 'creative' tossers buying the latest shiny Apple box to replace their 12 month old previous purchase where there buying their way to an Apple utopia, a world where computers look good and under perform and where music devices come with shoddy screens and second rate music playing capability. Still though I appreciate Apple's design ethos I really do not like the stupid generation of technophobes it has created. At least the staff in the Regent Street Store were uber efficient and extremely pleasant.