It’s funny the sorts of things we put up with until we know different.

We used to be happy with horses filling our streets with friendly messages and taking days to go shopping at the local Sainsbury’s. The smell covered up the eau-de-yak that many of us were afflicted with in those days, and the time was well spent having forty-two kids before reaching the milk counter.

We even used to be happy getting up in the middle of a rain-soaked night to pop out into the back garden to go squat in a dark and leaky hut. Sure we’d get a bit damp, and get crawled over a bit, but it was not unlike being in bed in those days, only with less snoring. A valuable opportunity for a bit of peace and quiet then.

However, when we realised how much fun could be had careening round corners on two wheels, faces distorted into something that would not be out of place on Doctor Who, we started gaining a distinct interest in shares in glue.

And when it was noted that we didn’t have to trudge around in the garden at midnight for a number one, and that such places could actually be moderately sanitary, and smell of pine, we brought the loo inside and installed speakers and an internet connection.

Now we hear that 62% of dial-up users have no interest in moving to broadband, with 35% citing cost, 20% seeing no need for the higher speeds. Now I was as surprised as the next born-again-computerist that dial-up users still shuffled among us, but no need for higher speeds? I’m sorry, but somebody must be a little confused. The last time I used a dial-up connection, it was so slow that time actually went backwards. There wouldn’t have been any need for Superman to fly round the earth to save Lois Lane, just pop the old dial-up connection on, boot up the Internet, and watch all the bad things undo themselves before everyone’s eyes.

But possibly the most troubling thing about this is the fact that I find myself in a quandary trying to come up with a convincing argument as to why they should change. It’d be a bit like trying to convince Robert Mugabe that a one-horse race isn’t really a race it’s just, well, a bit of a jog past a bunch of people. If they can’t see the big red sign saying “Welcome to the 21st Century, we thank you for driving carefully” all my waving and pointing is just me getting some exercise.

Maybe the last laugh will be on us though. With companies like the BBC serving up ever-increasing numbers of Eastenders episodes in ever-Higher Definition, and service providers refusing to improve their services until someone writes them a fat cheque and marries their daughter, we could see those old dial-up speeds taken out of tales of yore and thrust into Virgin’s next new hotness marketing campaign. Then who’s going to be sitting pretty on the only modems left in the whole of the western world?

In an earlier blog entry I talked about yet another UK haulier protest at the price of fuel. Well today it would appear they are at it again. They’re obviously keen fans of the old adage “if at first you don’t succeed…”.

If there’s one thing that conflict at any level brings though it’s change. Whether it’s hauliers blocking roads, or pilotless buzz-bombs flashing their way across Europe’s skylines, they all bring change. The strange thing is that the hauliers don’t seem to be able to see that it is them that needs to change.

The issue being cited is that, because of the high price of diesel, they state that they can no longer make a profit.

Let’s step back a bit and look at this from, say, Marks and Spencer’s position. They posted a loss today in their food division and promptly offed the department head. Fair enough, the world’s credit crunch is all his fault after all, the machiavellian crazy that he is. If M&S were to take the haulier’s line, they’d be straight to the government wanting to reduce tax on food.

But of course normal businesses don’t do such silly things. If they are having difficulties making a profit they either make a change so that they do make a profit, or they die and get replaced by someone more efficient at the job that can make a profit. They certainly don’t go blubbing to the government about it. I’ve never heard anything so ridiculous in my life!

Look at Prince Charles. Yesterday it was noted that he was using wine-based bioenthanol to run his Aston Martin Volante. Discussions over his use of a huge great frickin gas-guzzler aside, this is the sort of change that makes a difference. The high prices of fuel are not a problem, they are a challenge and Prince Charles has clearly shown that when the going gets tough, the rich run their cars on champagne.

Last week’s Economist had a special report on the enormous variety of research currently underway to either make cheaper fuel, or be rid of it altogether. I’m not going to dive into the detail, but just to convey a sense of enormity of what’s going on, here is a quick list of the notables…

Starting with wind power, we have on-shore, off-shore, improved blade materials, ever decreasing failure rates, and even discussions over grid upgrades to make such generators even more efficient.

With solar, the traditional hard silicon continues to play a part, but now more exotic materials are being used, in both flexible and solid forms, making cells printable onto any number of surfaces, and generating unprecedented sunlight harvesting efficiencies.

We have lens and mirror arrays which reflect the sunlight onto either water-containing vessel to create steam that runs generators, or directly onto solar cells. We have the chemical companies working on bio-fuels utilising grasses, trees and algae to either burn for energy, or to create oil as a natural by-product of their growth. Bacterias and sugars are being chemically or genetically altered towards fuel generation.

And this is not forgetting battery powered motors, fuel-cells, plug-in cars, nuclear fusion and fission, the conversion of garbage into oil through 2, 3 and 5-stage furnaces that can fit in your garage and can power a whole town, and even more besides.

So come on all you hauliers, buck up, take it on the chin, and come into the 21st century with the rest of us. You know prices will not stay down for long even if you manage to push through today’s madness. The time has come to make a change. The question is will you make it before your industry disappears, cos you better believe it’s going to happen. Automated freight transport through underground tunnels? Solid gold.

Always on the look out for new and inspirational reads, I came across The Guardian’s “100 Best Books of All Time” this morning. People that know me know I read a lot of books, but clearly all the rubbish ones. Out of these 100 books, I’ve read all of 1 - No.69 - 1984 by George Orwell, an excellent ditty, if a touch short. That said, perhaps I shouldn’t be too downhearted - the list was voted for by 100 noted writers from 54 countries, and we all know how eclectic writers can be in their views and reading material. War and Peace at No.89? Perhaps not the “100 Most Enjoyable Books of All Time” then.

A bit more up my street is the BBC’s Big Read top 100 books as voted by the good old general public of Great Britain. I’ve read 4 of the top 5 and 7 of the top 10, clearly making this a much more realistic list for the humble Joe. Funny how War and Peace still makes it into the top 20 though. I just can’t figure this little tyke. And beating The Hobbit too! One to add to my “Crazy-ass” list…

Two notables in this final list of the 778 Best Books of All Time; Asimov’s I-Robot gets a stirling 18th place, for which I heartily clap both hands together. He is an awesome author, and anyone with a pair of eyes and a dash of a reader’s heart should check out the Foundation Trilogy for solid gold storycrafting. The other is the splitting up of J.R.R.Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings into its constituent parts; The Fellowship of the Ring and The Return of the King get 4th and 6th place respectively, which certainly gets my vote on both counts. The Two Towers however gets a much lower score, and to my mind deservedly so. Has anyone actually managed to wade their way through this second installment more than once? Quite, quite treacly in its composition.

I think the BBC list gets first place in my list of book lists, and I look forward to working my way through some of the notable absences from my bookshelf. Read on MacDuff, read on…

Yesterday was apparently National Siesta Day. I must confess it completely passed me by in the hazy daze that my life seems to be filled with at the moment. But as I was yawning and nodding through the Murray game on centre court, no reflection of what was a fierce game by the Brit, it made me think about what kind of impact such low points in the day have on sports people.

Play at Wimbledon typically starts at around 12pm, a few short hours before what is reported to be one of two big lows of brain and body in any given day (the other being sometime around 4am). So if the reports on physical and mental difficulties during such times are true, then several questions spring to mind.

How would starting play at 10am affect people involved? Would it improve player’s abilities on-court? How about the umpire and line-judges calls?

And how about other sleeping issues. What about if one player gets 9 hours sleep the night before, the other 2? Did Roddick and Sharapova go out not through any lack of skill or training, but because their opponents had a better sleep than they did?

On top of that, do people coming from other parts of the world have an unfair advantage or perhaps disadvantage depending on the match time? If someone coming from America has their low period at 5, 6 or even 7pm due to body-clock differences, will they simply be more “on their game” than any Brit if their game starts at 2pm?

Now seems to be a time when all eyes are turned towards different factors affecting people’s games, including starting-gun placement giving inside runners an edge in track athletics, and new cutting-edge swimsuits, blamed for blowing world records out of the water. Perhaps now is the time to start looking into what effects the good old afternoon nap has on participant performance?

Tennis is a strange passtime. Everything about it is just slightly, well, left-of-field; the court shape, its size and layout, the net, ball, racquet, scoring, rules, all of it just a little on the odd side. If I was seeing it all for the first time with completely fresh eyes, I’d have to ponder long and hard about it’s true cultural and psychological meanings. Sure explanations abound as to the origins of the sport, and why things are the way they are, but it can’t be denied that it has one toe firmly dipped in the unusual. And what’s more, despite all of this strangeness, the game has stayed largely unchanged since the first WImbledon Championships way back in 1877.

Tradition of course plays the biggest part keeping things nailed in place. Tradition, the great passer-on of “the way things are done” from generation to generation, a bastion for pounds over euros, miles over kilometres, driving on the left whilst the rest of the world points and laughs from the right. Well, could scoring from love to deuce, passing 15 and 30 on the way, ever really be explained any other way?

The question is, what happens to such tightly held rhyme and unreason when tradition, particularly in one of the homes of world tennis, is set for a shake-up? Of course it would be great to have five or even ten Murrays, Henmans and Cavadays hitting the upper echelons of the sport, but does bringing into question the way things have “always been done” also bring into question the game as a whole? The organisation? The very spirit of the sport? Perhaps even, heaven forbid, the scoring system?

Actually history has shown that shake ups, even small ones, can serve to improve things for all concerned; a brief sideways glance at football’s passing-back-to-the-keeper rules, as well as formula one’s ditching of technological aids, only shows an added maturity and growth in both sports. Perhaps the inexplicable scoring system is safe for the time being, but only time will tell how lean and mean the tennis monster can become in the UK once all the rattly bits have shaken loose.

But for all this talk about tradition and maturity, how was the first day on centre court? Perhaps unsurprisingly, probably not that far removed from the experience of most people on their first day of Wimbledon, recent or otherwise; same loopy game, same bonkers rules, same air-hair-lairs pimms and tiffin in the afternoon. Oh, and of course, the same total and utter captivation from start to finish.

Utterly Brilliant.

And lo, the sun did shine and the tennis did play. Both quite surprising considering the traditional weather forecasts in the UK around this time.

Of course it’s the first day at Wimbledon today, and tickets for Centre Court mean an educational and entertaining one for me in the sunshine, and, rather incredibly, a chance to get some colour into these pale pins. Oh, and the opportunity to blabber and froth about it on my return.

I predict lots of good players winning, lots of not so good players dropping out, and some excellent tennis had by all. Just can’t wait.

Now I’m not one to be cynical. Much. But there are some pretty fundamental problems with sending a remote control car, with bolt-on scoop, to a whole other planet and expecting to get some hard science done.

So the Rovers were sent, and as far as these reports suggest they’re still, er, “bustin’ loose”, (or “running” in layman’s speak). Two remote controlled cars whose sole mission was to see if there was life on Mars. And drive around a bit. Actually a lot. Well, they did the driving bit extremely well, after all what do remote controlled cars do if not drive around? But the first? Well, I think the only word that can be said on the finding of life is “inconclusive”. Lots of pretty sun-baked holiday snaps though, nice one fellas.

And then we sent the Phoenix, this time to a new destination and on a new hunt, the hunt for ice, the presumed “staple diet” for life on Mars. If we find ice we can probably almost certainly be sure, if we’re lucky, that there really was in all likelihood a high probability of chance that life may have possibly existed on Mars. Maybe.

But amongst all of these rather grammatically shaky “possiblies” and “maybes”, there is actually a real chance that Phoenix may have actually discovered ice. One night a patch of white stuff was uncovered by the module, the next morning it had vanished. The scientists are leaning towards two possible theories at present; either it was stolen by a rival’s rover in the night whilst no-one was looking, or it was almost certainly probably ice that dissipated once uncovered. Ice! We’ve found ice!! Maybe!!!

Gah.

And so it continues. Despite my subtly irreverent undertones I am genuinely excited by the things we are trying to do as a species, particularly with regards to space and Mars. Which only serves to make it all the more painful when, on expecting a hard and fast synopsis of facts uncovered by some genuinely clever people, and astonishingly complicated equipment, I just get swamped by another bunch of probability indices and even more pictures of the Nevada desert family holiday of Summer ‘99.

Do I think we’ll find some actual, real stuff that we can fix a big “100% certainty” price tag on? Until we actually get some real-life squishy folk up there, taking detailed photos with a Fujipix and licking those white patches to see if they taste of summer rain, I just don’t know.

I like games. Good games can be a lot of fun (when you win). But I always feel a bit of a geek talking about them. Whether it’s board games, card games, computer games, or sport, they all engage, but serve to keep me sounding like I’m one gnat’s leg away from a trip to computer camp. At the age of 35.

But games seem to be shrugging off their nerdy overcoats and hitting the limelight this week. The BBC aired an interesting, if brief, article this morning on how games are made, currently sat in video form on their website [video link]. It’s great to give some air time to a great industry, though next time I hope they focus as much on the energy, creativity and just plain fun that can be had working on games, as they did on, well, animation and car design.

The UK also used to be a world-leader in games development, but it seems we are having to face up to stiff competition from all sides, and a growing shortage [video link] of people with key-skills required to do the development, particularly those good at maths. I remember from my Hogs of War days just how intense some of the 3D work can get; certainly not for the arithmetically challenged.

I am encouraged by the overall upturn in the games industry though, despite the current global belt-tightening, and apparently games now bring more money into the UK than films. Quite some feat. And with Sony and Apple [video link] pushing ever more dynamic content onto their ever more powerful and popular handsets, things are looking pretty rosy. And not just for back-closet loners; Second Life and World of Warcraft both continue to enjoy flourishing social scenes online, and the improvements in wireless technologies means that soon such social scenes will soon be accessible in public areas, in the proximity of other real-ilfe human beings.

Perhaps now is the time to start standing up and being proud of our geek-dom? Might even serve to cure some of this gamer-butt…

Okay, really, enough is enough. First we had vibrating toothbrushes that, if you knew how to clean your teeth, did nothing more than a normal toothbrush, except make fat cats, well, fatter. Oh, and ruin the planet.

Then we had vibrating razors, oh, sorry, “shaving systems”. This was a complete scream on two counts; firstly the adverts that stated that the vibrations gave you a “closer shave” by making the hairs stand on end, were very quickly denounced as being “complete bobbins”. Secondly, it rapidly got round that the company that owned Gillette, the razor brand, also owned Duracell, the battery brand. Well, I hope someone got a nice little bonus for hatching that little gem. Pure wallet-emptying, profit-boosting gold.

And now? Well, now would appear to be the right time to introduce the “vibrating mascara”. More specifically Estée Lauder’s “TurboLash All Effects Motion Mascara”. I know, I know, like a swift, solid blow to the stomach…

Apparently there’s a relationship between “vibration, length, volume, separation, curl, money, bank balance and inanity”, so the applicator vibrates as you cake-up yer lashes. Now I’m no scientist, so can’t vouch for most of those things, but it does appear to have all the makings of a bag of hogwash, right up there alongside the likes of Regenerist, Derma-genesis, Phil Collin’s Genesis, Retinol, Pro-retinol (!), Matrixyl 3000 (!!) and many many many more.

But, of course it goes without saying, irrespective of the dubious science behind them, and whatever skeptics like me blog, they’re still going to sell like absolute hotcakes.

<big sigh>

Y’know, some days will just be all doom and gloom, the news is bad, the weather’s bad, your hair’s bad, just bad all round.

But some days you get hit by such a multitude of positivity, stuff that really gets you energised, that you can’t help but forget about the harsh realities of the outside world, the reflection in the mirror, just for a moment, and simply sit and smile. I’m glad this is turning out to be one of those days.

This guy is simply magnificent. One of those people that has something never seen before, possibly never to be seen again. I don’t know what the heck you’d do with it, but good grief you can’t help but watch in amazement…

Mitchell and Webb just seem to be going from strength to strength at the moment, and this video clip just typifies their classic humor. “Ya see that? [points to a chicken running around on the floor] That’s actually made of chicken! Kill it and ya got free chicken!”. Priceless!

This clip just made me want to blub into my tea. I’ll save a description and let it speak for itself.

And this film is really setting up to be something special, and only two weeks to wait!

Y’see? Some days really are diamonds.