Tom Purves – Product Management, Fintech & AI

Happy as a clam this morning, cliche as it sounds working from starbucks, with a steamy mug of caffeine, sun beaming in and banging out powerpoints on a new little friend mr thinkpad.

You may all know me from my long-time relationship with mr tablet but I finally broke down and bought one of those radical machines with a keyboard on it. Unusual deal too, $650 a shiny thinkpad on ebay. Nothing like a cheap-and-chearful yet unbreakable thinkpad. Not the currentest model (X31) but score of a deal 12″ 3.4lb (mmm) 1.7GHz PM, and ATI graphics.

These graphics come with a near comic 16MB of RAM (it’s on-chip is why it’s so slight) but still more than enough to kick around XP or even Vista in classic mode at decent resolutions (I *heart* clasic mode, there’s a post to be made about that subject too, I feel like I owe MSoft a vista post, funny how that works, though I don’t if they’ll like to hear my impressions of Aero).

The catch is, I like MacOS far less, and don’t get me started on linux…. [dons falme suit…]

Apophenia explains (as pointed to by Stephanie Booth today)

“Academics have been noting that young people’s social and emotional energies have been moving from email to IM.

Do young people have email accounts? Yes. Do they login to them semi-regularly? Yes. Do they use it as their primary form of asynchronous communication for talking with their friends? No.”

As usual, the teens are ahead of us. It will be interesting how the trend evolves as IM finally starts to wash across the business world… (in some ways RIM’s are already the business medium of choice for the really important/juicy missives, the school yard gossips of the working world are they not?)

See the same meme from earlier this year: “Teens: Email is for old people” on Ars.

# Intra-racial couple : the notional social stigma associated with dating someone of exactly the same race

# I have a number of really cool records on vinyl, but sometimes I find myself sometimes reluctant to play them in that format. And not to play the mp3 in stead. because how else would I be able tobroadcast to the world exactly how cool I really am?

# (related) It’s funny, I’d actually pay for a device that listened to what my record player was playing, auto-magical-algorithmically recognized the song playing, looked up the meta details against some free online database and helpfully syndicated the feed to last.fm, to my msn and gtalk header etc. ( you know this is actually technically feasible… )

# (also related) Music is such an interestingly irregular good. The value to you of a good song has components both an intrinsic as well as a social (and some more one or the other). It’s not just the song, it’s also who else likes the song.

song of the day: Mates of State – Fraud in the 80’s
(I wish you could hear it on vinyl…)

click this bit to play: