Progress

Just thinking about what we can do now as opposed to what we could do ten , twenty or thirty years back. We used to buy from the local shop, market or high street although big business was giving us supermarkets and hypermarkets and shopping malls.

Our phones are communication devices , we can do video calling , share video as well as text and speech. Thanks to Arpanet and Tim Berners-Lee we have 24/7 to an unbelievable knowledge resource.

Also we used to only have radio , then TV , but although we still have these they also come through digital channels and where there were just a couple of options now thanks to digital , we seem to be unlimited , though the Bruce Springsteen song "57 Channels And Nothing On" sometimes comes to mind , but now that programs are on demand , you can never say there is nothing on.

I remeber having to order anything slightly out of the ordinary from record shops , "No Woman, No Cry" and "Jah Live" by Bob Marley come to mind, but remember being told "We don't sell singles and we only stock the top 20" when asking for a copy of "Ummagumma" by Pink Floyd at a furniture shop that also sold records. These days you can have your music or video immediately as long as you have the ability to pay for it.

Phone advertisements are always promoting the camera abilities of the device, the sound and connectivity is seldom mentioned, though the thing is that they are generally hand held computers, thought we can't use them for transportation ... yet. That's something that always confuses me, when, in Star Trek someone is transported where the atoms are disassembled at point of departure and reassembled at the point of arrival is that just a clone at the point of arrival or the original person , and if the clone has all the memories of the original person , how would it know that it is a clone. The other side of that is that our bodies shed and recreate layers and we are not the same person we were last year. I'm sure that could be the basis of a short story , it is about time I actually wrote one.

I could go one about driverless cars and other vehiles and Smart everything but think it's time to share some music.

Maybe we will go with the Springsteen one , while we have hundreds of channels and streams , a lot of it is filled with rubbish , but a lot of it is the highest quality. You can never say there is nothing on.

Older Than The Internet

Today is the thirtieth anniversary or the World Wide Web as we know it, and it came into my head that my two wonderful daughters are both older than the Internet, which obviously means that I am as well by another twenty five or so years. I was born just as rock and roll really hit with Buddy Holly, Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry.

A  definition of the Internet comes from the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C):

"The World Wide Web is the universe of network-accessible information, an embodiment of human knowledge."

Tim Berners-Lee came up with the protocol for accessing the Internet as we do today and can be read about via the W3C link above. This is a development of Arpanet (Advanced Research Projects Agency Network developed by the US Defence Department), and had been put forward by many artists and science fiction writers.

The Who's "Lifehouse" project (which was scrapped and salvaged as "Who's Next") posited a population connected by "The Grid" so in some ways this was an inevitable development, and now we are are connected by mobile devices and computers and smart devices.

People install "smart devices" in their home such as Amazon's Alexa , but that is a step too far for me even though I have a Kindle that has Alexa on it, although it has never been able to answer a question that I have asked it and cannot play my music, apparently only able to access Spotify playlists, and I don't touch Spotify.

I wasn't going to write anything until I saw the anniversary on Google, so I am going include a Chuck Berry song performed by Buddy Holly which you can listen to and watch thanks to Tim Berners-Lee's development of the US Defence Department's prototype.

Have a great Tuesday.

Ideas

I love showering but always find drying myself a bind and was thinking what a great idea a full body air drier would be. No wet towels , afterwards, no picking up wet towels to dry yourself with if you are not first in and just the feeling of warm air on your body would almost be like a mediterranean holiday. I love warm water on my body and warm air would be just as good.

The thing is many years ago what would be the next step, Yellow Pages? Your local libriary? If you asked friends they may think you are some kind of deviant... warm air on your naked body.... you pervert sir ... how dare you. But we use hair driers (or is it dryers?) , we use hand driers , and I do like the Dyson Airblade, and we also have fans to keep us cool when the weather is hot , so all the bits are there.

However thanks to Berners-Lee and Arpanet we have the Internet, the worlds biggest reference library and if you search Google for "full body drier" this is what you get. There are a lot out there. You can get this fairly snazzy one by Valiryo on Amazon, though at £900 to replace my shower towels I am still tempted. I don't know of any friends who have one.

So I had a great idea but found that someone had got there first, though if someone were to offer me a free one I would take it straight away.

Anyway , although it's Monday it looks like a gorgeous day so I will probably be walking into work and no doubt looking for things to video and photograph. Also this post is keeping up the #August50 and if I do another one tonight then I should be starting to get towards the 50 that I am aiming for.

So the song has to be Polly Jean Harvey's "Dry" ... one of those songs that is not on the artists album of the same name like Led Zeppelin's "Houses of The Holy" , what else could it be ... have a great Monday everybody...

The Joy of Communication

Thanks to TV , Radio , Newspapers and the Internet we can find out things that we want to know and and a lot of things that we don't.

The success of the internet , effectively invented by Tim Berners-Lee is due to the fact that it was open source and therefore free to use. Yes you pay for access via your connection , but the internet itself is free to use. If it hadn't been it would have just become another closed network. This was explained to me on TV last night on a program I caught some of while channel hopping , but it was probably on BBC4.

This morning Terry Wogan on the radio mentioned a cook who "peeled peas" , I hope this was a joke rather than some mad new cooking methodology, Sunday Lunch will take weeks to prepare unless Primark take over the supply with their vast army of slave labour (how else do you sell shirts for £3 , it's certainly not economies of scale).

One of the things the internet allows is anyone can use it to be contacted or to advertise effectively for free , though people have to be able to find you. Here are four sites which are essentially information sites about the owner and their trade but have still managed to generate sales of their products be it pictures or plants.

• Woodlands Nursery - Plants in Louth, Lincolnshire


• Bob Armstrong - Landscape Artist


• Mark Johnson Travel Photography - Some amazing European photography


• Paul Campbell - Scriptwriter (Eastenders , Casualty , Doctors . IMDB Entry here)


• Mark Johnson Aircraft - Professional Aircraft photography featuring some amazing shots.


• Harry Willis - Gas Boiler Servicing and related services in Newcastle

These are the new equivalent of the card in the shop window or phonebox, but with a potentially wider audience, and they show that the internet is for everybody and anybody.