Flight Training

My day started at 4am with waking up and getting ready for taxi pickup at 4:30am to take me to Luton airport.

I slept most of the way. Getting through customs wasn't without challenge. I was accused of having too many bags. Only one permitted.... I had forgotten my suit bag with my spare shirts but simply lumped two bags together as one (by strapping them together). I think the guy realised that It was a stupid Luton rule and let me through.

It got me thinking about rules. Once through that gateway check there were plenty of other peeps checking me out - bag scanning (5), police standing to check people passing by (4), boarding (3), escort onto Tarmac (3) and on board the plane (3). That's 18 more people. Official people. People who could have sent me packing. I was a little conscious of being Simon-two-bags-Small, so I lumbered them along together pretending they were one. But no-one gave a shit. They didn't even see two bags because they were looking for something else: liquids, terrorists, people sneaking into priority boarding lines, people getting on the wrong plane. Funny how once inside one loop people assume that you are fully legit. I wonder if terrorists exploit this phenomenon.

Then on board I witnessed the Ryan Air training Programme in action. I swear that the guy who was opening and shutting the door had never done it before (come on I hear you say, don't exaggerate). I'm not exaggerating! Because I heard his trainer saying "here's how you open and close the main door." And then each time they showed him something, he would do what they said and then they would do it also just to check. Like when you see a couple kissing in public and you are a teenager and you say or think "could you guys get a room!"; I was watching this instruction sat by the door and thinking "could you guys get a room please? A training room, a training plane... Just not this plane we are about to take off in!".

Neurotic, moi?

Safely to Dublin and to the funds conference.

No bloody iPad roaming coverage in Dublin either! At least not for me...

The conference was at the new Landsdowne road stadium now known as Aviva Stadium.

I saw the huge crane lifting up two letters at a time and all the letters stacked up in a pile waiting to be loaded. Took about 7 blokes all day to get those letters up. Did they budget for that?

A couple of highlights of the day were when a Belgian woman who was just recently into rugby (living in Dublin) said that the All Blacks were from Australia. I don't usually get offended about anything Australian, but that hurt. And another guy from Dublin was talking to me about something and I mentioned Sean Fitzpatrick. he said "which one" and I said "is there another one". He pissed himself laughing and got me to repeat my comment again and again to Dubliners. The other Sean fitzpatrick embezzled a whole ton of money from an Irish bank recently!

Location:Cafe in Dublin

ipad no roam from home when in Lux

Imagine my disappointment when the new iPad I bought was rendered pretty much useless and incapacitated while on my trip last Thursday and Friday to Luxembourg.

I went to the trouble to sign up with Vodafone over O2 for the mobile package because Vodafone offered roaming.

But the ipad packs a mini-sim. And I went to an Apple store and a telco store in Lux to discover that the 3 networks in Lux have not upgraded to the mini-sim.

Apple is pushing the technology in the iPad so much that the telco networks are upgrading / adapting to use the mini-sim. Amazing isn't it.

The hotel I was staying at didn't have straight forward wifi. So I couldn't use it there. And at client meetings, they didn't have wifi full stop, so I couldn't get online there.

I was away for two full days with no internet connection on my ipad. It felt wrong.

One thing that really hits home is how the iPad is a slave to a master PC. You really need to keep driving content onto the iPad from a PC/Mac. Photos, music, videos. You can download applications from the Apple store on the device (which I couldn't even do in Lux) and use the internet but pretty much anything else you need a pc/mac for.

Happy surfing....

Location:Duke's Ave,Hounslow,United Kingdom

Location:Devonshire Passage,Hounslow,United Kingdom

Kitchen Technology - the Vitamix

Wow

Debra and I debated whether or not to buy a super blender.

Gerald Henry stayed with us in January and I was especially keen, but we finally plucked up the courage to go to Wholefoods in Kensington to buy one last weekend.

Weighing in at 400 pounds (that's the price tag!). It's a beast amongst kitchen appliances.

It's the only thing that I have ever come across that:
1) juices
2) makes hot soups in 3 mins
3) makes ice cream
4) blends super quick
5) crushes ice in nano seconds.

It's out of this world. It really is.

I am so thrilled with it. It is very easy to clean after using and it is super strong.

The blades do not need sharpening because they are not sharp to begin with. And you can push the juice ingredients down into the bowl. You never change the blades. The casing for the jug is clear polycarbonate - so it is super strong.

Here's something to look out for:
when you get a frappacino, or a juice when you are at a shop, have a look at the blender they use. It is very square (usually a white base) and easy to attach the jug - it just slots on. And there are two switches and one dial on the front of the Vitamix.

I am a huge fan of juicing since 2002. It's my breakfast through to lunchtime. Whenever I went through the US, I would always always always have to stop at Jamba juice for the thrill of their juices. When I saw the demonstration at Wholefoods, I realised that Jamba Juice use the Vitamix in store. That's why the juices are soooo good.

We're having home-made hummus in 30 seconds thanks to the vitamix and it is green smoothies all round for breakfast...

yummm..... want some?

Location:Devonshire Passage,Hounslow,United Kingdom

What is a computer and where did it come from?

I am writing this in a cafe over lunch in Luxembourg. Sun is shining and vegetarian salade is on its way over...

The main guy who cracked the German Enigma code during World War II was Alan Turing...

What I've learned is that he is widely regarded as the visionary behind the computer. As a young student in his 20s, he came up with the idea after his boyfriend died. He was thinking of how his former boyfriend could have his mind exist after his body was gone. That got him thinking about mind and intelligence as an abstract concept.

So he is walking across a field one day and suddenly a revelation hits him. What if a machine working on simple instructions and given enough time could work through complex mathematical calculations? Could it do it faster and better than a human.

Isn't that incredible?

In the 30s for someone to come up with that idea when everything that had gone before was a machine to speed up manufacturing or make physical things.

This guy decides he wants to make a machine.

He ends up working / leading the code-breaking effort (which if it was left to human endeavour would have a probability of success of 50 million million million to 1).

So they crack the code with a very very complex machine. It had to crack the individual code from an individual Enigma machine on a daily basis (because each machine could be configured differently and independently each day).

And after the war, that become the foundation, the building block of the first mainframe computer.

And now we have the iPad. Such a supersmart machine.

It just amazes me how much of a radical concept this thought of a machine to calculate mathematics was.

On the trip to Luxembourg today I began thinking about the future of machines and intelligence. It really could take a leap forward if we were to capture the genius of a person's experience and wisdom to advise us.

Imagine standing on the shoulders of generations of experience and being able to master distinctions and skills with ease.

Like a personal coach, but more, so much more than exists today.

Somehow this wraps around your life like a fitted jacket, so that you let it take all the inputs of your life: your speech, your actions, your habits, your spending, your relationships, your work, your food. You want it to have all the inputs so that it can make some sense of them. You are able to serve up the kind of wisdom that you want to hear from the virtual coach. You want to be top of the game, you will get some strict no-nonsense coaching.

Think of all the computing our mind is doing on the back of all the daily stimulus. We're not in much of a fit state to process what's coming in and going on and separate the wood from the trees. What are we missing? What's so obvious to others but not clear to us?

How would sages from different era's advise us today?

Confucious? Buddha? Jesus?

Or living people from different walks of life:

Nelson Mandela? James Dyson? Richard Branson?

I began thinking about technology around personal finance. Man it is clunky and dumb. There is a site called mint which organises bank accounts and sorts expenses, but the paradigm that the banks still operate on is that you have to log in and suck out the information from your account.

To be able to put a personal finance platform together that allows you to categorise all the types of expenses you make and tracks it and pushes it to a portal that graphs it all in real-time would just be the dogs bollocks.

Being able to see what and where you are with money at all times...

Tie this into the coaching and you would see some amazing patterns of what happens when you get brilliant news and what happens when you get terrible news - how your conversations, your work and relationships are affected and how your spending pattern and eating and drinking pattern is affected.

We should be able to see the facts of how we are operating in the world. The facts and the results. Then you can have different interpretations on those facts.

Imagine seeing what phrases you repeat most often?

Pie in the sky stuff. But is it any more pie in the sky than the bloke who dreamed up the computer in the first place?

Dream on....

Location:Lunching in Luxembourg

Day 2 on the ipad - fast cars!

So day 2 and all is going well with the iPad.

I tried out the racing car game called asphalt today and it is incredible! You turn the ipad left and right like a steering wheel. It was such a brilliant design for the game. There are different types of cars, courses and challenges. For £3.99 it was an absolute bargain.

I stopped playing games on computers about 10 years ago because I found I would get too addicted to them. I'm really addicted to asphalt right now. Went out on my morning run and couldn't stop thinking about it.

I think it is the combination about being excited about the ipad, enjoying getting back to playing video games, liking to drive fast cars (ferraris and aston martins), and starting to get into watching formula one racing. It's all combined together.

TV BATTLES
I think the iPad and tablets generally are going to herald a whole new era of TV interactivity.

I see that apple are going to modify their Apple TV offering in response / anticipation of the android TV offering. It is looking like people will be able to control their tv screens using an ipad / iphone - so the TV becomes like a massive monitor.

The amount of great youtube content available on the ipad - it displays it brilliantly - and the the whole living room eco-system is changing radically.

It really is going to shift the living room with Android and Apple battling it out. It should become a new ecosystem where TV rights holders can finally get some content on the TV without going through broadcasters and traditional pay tv platforms.

I think it will really work if it is a kind of an over builder situation. So that the consumer can still have a window into say a sky box. So they can switch seamlessly between youtube, sky box, games, dvds, photos and browsing.

The thing that has changed too is the resolution of the tvs for displaying content. We found that if you get a particular high res tv, it works really well for showing web pages.

So the time is coming - I would say 2012 - when people have a seamless type of viewing experience via their big monitor (the television).

NEWSPAPERS
I downloaded to the iPad the "editors choice" of the New York Times - it's great for a free edition. Gives me 2-3 pages of stories that change each day. I've also got the Financial TImes until end of July as a free version (sponsored by Hubolot watches (sp?). And The Times is available for £9.99 per month. Funny, I just couldn't bring myself to pay the £9.99. I haven't spent that on the Times in the last 9 months, so I'm not going to "pay the man" for content I'm not that interested in. The other reason for not buying it is that I might become interested in it and I'm not sure I want to spend so much time reading the Times.

On the iPad application store they have the application (ie: the Times) and then they have other people's comments on the application. You have to buy the application in order to review it. Loads of people excited about the Times being available. No-one knows if it includes yet the Sunday TImes. So I logged in at 10.30am and didn't see anyone confirming / complaining about their £9.99 spend.

Now I have just logged back in to see the latest reviews. The Sunday Times was not included and there are 100 new posts today all spitting tacks. The posts on Friday and Saturday were largely 5 stars (about 40 of them). Now there are about 100 reviews giving it 1 star and telling people not to waste their money. People rule don't they?

This economy is so fast that a company needs to be able to respond within about 30 minutes on a sunday to a storm brewing. It's no good waiting another two days for business hours to commence. All that hard work by the development team has gone up in smoke thanks to poor explanations and descriptions that were left suitably vague as to what people would get with their £9.99 a month subscription.

And so to bed....

Touch Screen - the first 24 hours

All can say is wow.

As I write this I am sitting on a couch at Dukes Ave with a wireless keyboard that is enabling me to touch type 2 metres away from where the iPad is sitting.

I bought the iPad yesterday. What a revolution.

When Steve Jobs first launched it I watched the event live and I realised I was witnessing a key moment in history. One that doesn't come along very often.

A time when you can see the changing of the guard. I was astounded that so called "analysts" didn't get it. They were oogling over the things that were missing without realising the paradigm shift that Jobs had created.

The tablet has arrived.

Apple created the mouse in 1984 (?) and they killed it 16 years later in 2010.

On the day that the iPad launched in London, news broke that Apple are about to overtake Microsoft in Market Cap. Wishing I bought Apple shares back in April 2009 when I witnessed another small but significant event at the Luxembourg airport: three people in the security line ahead of me: They all emptied their pockets and they all had an iphone. I thought then - we've hit a tipping point. Soon after Apple announced ridiculously huge sales of the iPhone, way surpassing analyst predictions.

So here we have the iPad.

The reason that prompted me to start to write this blog is to track my reaction to the world unfolding and put down my vision of the world we are heading into and the changing world around us.

There are two approaches to blogging: 1) make each blog a refinement of craft. 2) make it more a stream of consciousness. I'm opting for the latter. My "uncle" Paul (he's actually Debra's uncle) learnt how to build a dry stonewall in Ireland. The trick to building the wall (which you lay by hand, one rock at a time) is to NEVER PUT A ROCK DOWN THAT YOU HAVE PICKED UP. ONCE YOU PICK IT UP, IT MUST GO IN THE WALL. My approach with blogging is similar. Let it flow, keep it running and keep going (ironically I had to fix up spelling and grammar writing this paragraph).... So the blog has got to make sense - and be entertaining.

ENTERTAINMENT - I have been playing with the iPad for a few hours yesterday after I bought it. And this morning with Henry (9.5 months old and growing into a whole new world). So I have been using the iPad to go onto the Application Store and find out about all the applications that I could load up on the iPad.

It was a great experience. But I felt like jumping on my laptop that is sitting next to me and googling the best iPad apps. So I started using my laptop and searching on the screen for an ipad application - when I found the laptop wasn't working properly.

Then I realised what I had done. I was trying to touch the screen of the laptop to open up the link on the website I was on. In that moment, I thought "silly me", "holy cow", "that was fast!"

You see what I thought when I saw Steve Jobs using the iPad all that time ago was that he has revolutionised the way that we are going to interact with the internet. A mouse is a limited 1 click, 1 hand mechanism. Life is so much more sophisticated when you can use both hands and 8 fingers and 2 thumbs to find your way around.

Here within 24 hours of getting my iPad I had adapted so quickly (and seen Henry engage for the first time with a computer) and now I can't go backwards. The laptop sitting next to me now looks so clunky. So heavy, so much wastage. A massive hard keyboard (instead of the ipads's softkeyboard) and a flat un-interactive non-touch screen.

It is like looking at a relic already. Outmoded and redundant. Not completely redundant because of Apple's closed system.

But it won't be long.

Tablets are going to be the number one christmas present this year.

Now Apple have led the charge and sold a million usits in a month or so in the US alone - everyone is playing catch-up. Android is Google's mobile operating system and it is storming ahead. It is overtaking Microsoft in the number of smart phones that run on it after just 18 months. It is going to be inside Sony TVs - allowing you to use internet on your TV as you have never been able to before. And Android is going to power the tablets of the future.

The key difference for developers is that Android who partners with all device manufacturers - is completely open. Meaning, the technology allows for a developer to write an application, integrate it to Android and run it. Android takes care of the form of the device - phone/tablet/tv. But it does it in a very smart way so developers can maximize their work.

And if you compare that to Apple's ecosystem... Apple is more like a promoter of goods. So imagine you're an entertainer, if you want to entertain all the people that Apple can get you in front of, here's what you have to do: sign up to Apple as your agent. Now Apple is repreesenting you, but taking a 30% fee for any ticket sales. They will put you in the venue, but first you have to show them your act. Lets say you're a magician. And the world's top magicians are with Apple. In fact Apple itself has a magic act. In order for Apple to represent you, you must do your act for them. But not just once. You have to do it over and over. In fact, you have to let them video your magic act. Then, (and here's the kicker) you have to tell them how you did every trick. You have to write down in precise detail andn show themm how to do your routine.

Is it any wonder that developers are hanging out for Android? In the Android world - they are not interested inlooking at your act to see how you did your tricks, but they might represent you for a fee. It's a much more open platform, leaving you to do what it is that you do best: work your magic.

Location:Devonshire Passage,Hounslow,United Kingdom