James Lelyveld's Blog

Recently I’ve been having issues with the remote buttons on my iPhone headphones, the headphones were working fine but the volume control & call answer buttons would only work occasionally and eventually stopped working completely.

This led me to worry that either the headphones were broken or there was something wrong with my phone, fortunately the fix was much simpler. The issue was fluff collecting in the headphone socket, all I had to do to fix it was get a twist & tie and fish the fluff out, voila everything working fine again. If I can get hold of some pressurised air (as used for cleaning keyboards) I’m going to give that a go to give it a more thorough clean.

Thought I’d write quick post in case anyone else is having the same issue.

It’s something I’ve been after for ages, something that I’ll carry around without thinking about, that I can add notes on. Add ideas as I think of them and save them where they won’t get forgotten.
The last is critical, I’ve previously had a palm and various phones or smart phones with note taking capabilities, however they all fell down on one or more criteria, the most common being notes getting lost.

Syncing is all very well but that only works if you reference the sync location regularly. With the iPhone I can make notes in a relevant place, to my Blog, to my mail etc.
The more apps that I find the greater the scope for me to capture ideas. I can even draw sketches of concepts that will automatically sync with my mac. Suddenly I have the ability to capture Ideas and concepts as they occur to me. It not only makes me more productive, it also makes me blog more (as demonstrated) and less stressed as there are less things I’m focussing on keeping in my head.

For all those who have an I phone I’ll be preaching to the converted, for the rest of you I’m probably one of a miriad of voices going on about it – I can only urge you to take the leap, you won’t look back.

So I don’t want to be negative about any scheme to cut carbon emissions, but there are some quite major flaws in this as a stand alone program. For those of you who haven’t seen, the government are offering a £5,000 incentive to anyone buying an electric car. This looks great on the surface but I’m wondering just how much the environment will really benefit from this scheme.

My initial concern is with cost, electric cars are expensive, I suspect £5,000 isn’t going to tip the balance towards one unless you had pretty much already decided. Regardless of that however the main problem I can see is that this incentive looks like it’s doing something but doesn’t actually change the amount of Carbon being emitted. Even if everyone switched to electric cars tomorrow we’d still need to get the power to charge them from somewhere – which means power stations and our current infrastructure couldn’t stand the load. Unless we make our power generation greener switching to electric cars will make no odds to the environment, (aside from making people feel better), whilst distracting people from solutions that would make a difference.

To my mind the money would be better spent investing in renewable energy and enforcing cuts on industry but then that doesn’t make as good press…

So my take on the debate as to whether Google is making us stupid. My opinion is no, I don’t agree that easy access to a large amount of information impairs our ability to think. A good way to think of this is like Einstein when quizzed by Edison as to the speed of sound, Einstein couldn’t remember off the top of his head and a lot of fuss was made about Edison foxing Einstein. Einstein’s response, when later asked about the commotion, was that he didn’t see the value of retaining a nugget of information like the speed of sound in his memory when he could just look it up in a book if he needed it. I was reminded of this by this article in this weeks New Scientist, taking that view forward all that google is providing us with is far easier access to that ‘book’ of information. Access to more information is only going to allow you to make more informed decisions.

Now there are some other interesting points in the original piece about attention span decreasing. This could potentially be attributed to the web, or at least the way we surf the web. However I personally find reading large amounts of information on a computer screen to not be particularly comfortable – hence the tenancy to scan if it’s a long article that you’re not that interested in. Combine this with the wealth of information available on the web and other media, I think this makes us more selective about what we choose to spend time reading. I don’t find that this behaviour when surfing the web spills over to print media, I still read books as I always have and really enjoy reading big books. I think the attention span change is more to do with time constraints than google reducing our intelligence.

Angelo Debarre
So Andy Aitchison who I work with pointed me in his direction, check him out here, or do a search on uTube.

Just unbelievable, he makes it look almost effortless.

If you want to see him check out these gigs

So having resisted the low level nagging from osmosoftians about joining twitter I finally succumbed during a mind-numbingly dull 2 hour conference call today. After 2 hours I’m now disturbed by how addictive I’ve finding it.

So @james_lelyveld if you’re interested, as a one time sceptic I’m now a fan, if you’ve not tried it you really should ;o)

Welcome to my blog, it’s taken far too long for me to get this up but it’s finally here…..