Archive for Life
Is your next car a skin job?
June 10th, 2008 • Journalism, Life
Vegas: squalor, meet paradise
April 8th, 2008 • Life
A colleague reckons that Vegas is his idea of hell, and couldn’t begin to understand why I’d take my family there. ‘It’s all the shit in the world, packed into one place,’ he says. ‘Why would you want to swim in your own excrement?’.
Bit strong, maybe, but he has a point. In the last five days, I’ve seen a dead bum being loaded onto an ambulance trolley (underneath a freeway - is there no more inauspicious way of dying?). I’ve seen creatures that can be no more than 10 per cent original woman parading the corridors of Caesar’s Palace, and I’ve watched drunken college crowds get a little too close to lynch mob.
But its dark side has nothing to do with the drunken crowd that invades the city on a Friday night - you’ll find that mob in any urban centre anywhere in the world, and they’re as harmless as a pack of over-enthusiastic puppies. Same goes for the sex and gambling. Both are, on the whole, cartoon funnies for the aforementioned puppies.
No, you’ll find Vegas sinister for more subtle reasons, like the millimetre-thin gap separating smiling American bonhomie from sudden aggression that’s a thoughtless word away from heavy violence.
Try it yourself. A waiter will be smiles and Hi’s one second, and a sullen-faced heavy robot the next. You can flick the switch by handing over a credit card that’s rejected on the first swipe, or asking a question that isn’t on the script. They Cannot Compute, and you’re instantly made to feel as uncomfortable as possible. Same trick works in a store or a hotel reception desk. Anywhere at any time, in fact.
The real head-woozer is how close all this sits to paradise. To see it for the first time, drive to Vegas from Los Angeles. Hour upon hour of desert and mountains, with only the occasional fake town, and then… a city. You hit a crest on I15, and there’s The Strip, complete with a volcano, The Eiffel Tower, The Statue of Liberty and a forum from Rome.
Cab drivers are educated, and incredibly well informed when it comes to city affairs. You can sit in any bar and strike up a conversation that may go on all night. You cannot eat badly, even if you tried. There are more jobs than people, so much so that 6000 newcomers arrive to handle the work every month.
The Strip is a parade of genres that would otherwise never share a pavement. Look at the faces and guess the origin: Seoul, Compton, Berlin, Addis Ababa. The guys from Kansas University swig beers alongside a conference group from Kenya. It’s all there, round the clock, and no-one is controlling it, or not that you can see, anyway.
I’ve been coming to Vegas every year for the last five or six, and I leave tomorrow for the Red Eye back to Heathrow. An hour after I saw the dead bum being loaded into the back of an Ambulance under a freeway at noon, and a crowd of locals gathered to help my wife after she tripped and fell just two hours later. As I said, squalor and paradise.
A message to United Airlines
April 3rd, 2008 • Business, Life
You can usually tell when a company has wandered off the path. It’s the atmosphere in the reception, a shared look on the face of the staff, or maybe an indiscrete comment from one of the juniors on the team.
I’ve just arrived in Las Vegas from London, having flown via San Francisco with United Airlines. I chose United because of the price: it was lower than any rival fare. After booking the flight and hotel through Expedia, a little research revealed that I could upgrade my United seat through their Economy Plus Access scheme - $349 would buy more legroom for myself and one other passenger. I’m 6ft 4in tall and my son’s a good 6ft, so we paid.
I arrived at Heathrow to see the longest damn queue I’ve ever witnessed - hundreds and hundreds of United passengers weaving through Terminal 3. Read more »
Classic Mac ad: the way it should have been
April 2nd, 2008 • Advertising, Life
Spooky
March 29th, 2008 • Life
Flickr slideshow of Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch. Silent Hill, anyone…?
LiveLeak withdraws Fitna
March 29th, 2008 • Life, Video
I’m a LiveLeak addict. So it’s no surprise that, along with three million other people, I ended up watching Fitna, the 17-minute film from Dutch politician Geert Wilders. Today, the video has been removed after the LiveLeak team received ‘threats to our staff of a very serious nature’.
They go on to explain:
“This is a sad day for freedom of speech on the net…. We would like to thank the thousands of people from all backgrounds and religions who gave us their support… We stood for what we believe in, the ability to be heard, but in the end the price was too high.”
I suppose we can safely assume that the threats will now arrive at the door of Google.
Must Get Me One Of These…
March 27th, 2008 • Life, Strange, Technology
Four hours of sleep a night: thank God I’m normal
March 26th, 2008 • Life
So I’m listening to BBC Radio 4 on the way home tonight, and there’s an investigation into what counts as ‘normal’ sleep patterns.
Turns out there aren’t any. Some professor from a UK centre of learning argued that sleep patterns varied so widely than the notion of ‘average’ was a nonsense. As long as you feel ‘fit to face the day’ when you wake, you’ve slept enough.
From what I can recall from the piece, ‘insomnia’ is clinically diagnosed as the inability to sleep for more than three nights a week for a period of a month.
Well, thank God for that. I can happily put my head to the pillow tonight, knowing that I won’t actually drift for a further two hours, safe in the knowledge that there’s nothing wrong with me. I don’t have insomnia: it’s not that I can’t get to sleep, more that I view 1am as good working time being wasted. Which would be dandy, were it not for the fact that I wake at 6.45am, desperate for my wife to tell me that it’s Saturday, and I’m all set to sleep in until 11am.
How long is your digital shadow?
March 24th, 2008 • Internet, Strange
Just tried a fascinating test launched by EMC that attempts to quantify my ‘digital footprint’. You can download the test here (thanks to Read/Write Web for the pointer).
According to a recent EMC-sponsored white paper (The Diverse and Exploding Digital Universe), we’re leaving a vapor trail of 1s and 0s behind us every day, either in the form of stuff we volunteer (uploaded pictures, videos, emails etc), or - perhaps more interestingly - stuff that we’re not so aware of (telephone records, records of web searches, flight tickets etc).
I ran the test before writing this. My daily footprint is a little over 6300MB. I can’t say I’m surprised: by any standards, I’m a heavy user of gadgets and the web. But the real shock came when I launched EMC’s ‘ticker’, which tries to put a figure on the total amount of hard drive space I’ve swallowed in my lifetime. If it’s anywhere near the truth, I’ve chomped through 524GB of storage, all of which is presumably out there… somewhere.
Which I guess is EMC’s point: I don’t think twice about signing up to offers from airlines and online stores, then happily forget about it. Why do I think I’m going to regret that some time soon?
Oh, and in case you’re wondering, the white paper suggests that the human race ‘created and replicated 281 exabytes of data in 2007′ (before you start counting on your toes, an exabyte is one billion gigabytes).
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