Very occasionally something goes wrong and you can’t get the BBC website. Oh my God, you think, has the world ended? What could possibly take the BBC offline? It’s funny how we think that the BBC’s website should be more robust and resistant to code screw-ups or inexplicable breakdowns than other websites.

Usually, the BBC website shows back up within minutes and all is well. You can relax in the knowledge that a battleship-sized asteroid hasn’t knocked the earth of its magnetic axis and messed up all communications across the planet. Nor has a NASA-covered up brown dwarf star (masquerading as an icy comet) initiated an Extinction Level Event.

Joking aside, it is telling to notice just how destabilising it feels when a website like BBC doesn’t work. Worse yet those times when you can’t connect to the internet at all. I don’t know about you, but I will admit to a sort of nameless panic at being suddenly cut off from…well, you know, the real world. 

I was watching the TV tonight and I saw Barclay’s ad for Flexible Bonds which ended with the voiceover exhorting people to “Google ‘Barclays Flexible Bonds’. I enjoy watching businesses use Google in this way. Barclays are, of course, supremely confident that their results will come high up in Google. And so they do, I am sure.

Of course, I’m also interested to test just how well Barclays has sown this particular meadow for the keywords ‘Barclays flexible bonds’. You’d hope it was done well. You’d expect it to be done well. And if it IS done well, then you won’t see my post anywhere – which is how it should be. If you DO see this post, then I’d argue that something’s gone wrong somewhere in the Barclays’ online strategy.

You know me. Nothing malicious in my intent, just insatiably curious to see what happens.

I went to a school reunion last weekend. One of my old school friends is now a bit of a ‘business guru’ and, inspired by the 30 year interval between seeing people, blogged about change – including a picture of a yellow road sign reading ‘change ahead’.

‘I wonder how many times that sign’s been used?’ I thought to myself – and went to consult Tin Eye, an amazing image reverse search engine. You upload the image you’re interested in (a screen grab of the yellow sign picture in my case), hit a button and in seconds it will find a whole list of instances where that image has been used. Since the file names of all these occurrences are different, this operation can only be by analysis of the bitmap itself – quite some mind-boggling feat.

Tin Eye found 17 instances of this image (but I’m sure there are a lot more out there). In each case, the wording had been changed but Tin Eye found it anyway based on the overall composition of the picture. I decided to add mine to the list but be a bit more… honest about it

** Online reputation boost due to howtomendit.com and the internet generally!! **

Same happened to us this morning. Can’t live without one. Can’t (frankly) be arsed to start thinking about ‘repair man’ (if such a reliable person can even be found any more?). So started immediately thinking about just buying another. Hell, we’ve had this one running continuously for 4 years – it’s not as if it hasn’t seen good service.

But before spending another £500 I went to our friend Google.

And discovered that if your LG condenser dryer stops heating, you might want to take off the back metal panel (after switching off from the mains, of course) – whereapon you’ll find a little red reset switch.

If you press that little red reset switch, the dryer will start heating again. At least mine has.

I’m not sure it’s a permanent fix (there’s something about the filter sensors increasingly coming on – but no idea of how to get to those sensors to clean them…) – but I’ve just done it and it worked for now.

Thank you Internet. I’m suddenly £500 better off than I was about to be. Nice.

Two other things:

1) LG – why don’t you paste a little note on the machine itself saying “If your heater element should stop working…”

2) LG – why don’t you print your little instruction stickers that you DO have on the machine upside down in future? That way I’ll actually be able to read them when I’m on my hands and knees trying to fix the unit (instead of putting the ‘right’ way up at floor level?)

First of all it was the earliest screen appearance of the flat-screen TV in the 1960 ‘The Time Machine’ directed by George Pal. Now, we bring you arguably the first recorded use of the word ‘pixelated’ – the two little old ladies in the courtroom scene in the 1936 Gary Cooper classic ‘Mr Deeds Goes To Town’.

I say ‘arguably’ because of course, the lil’ ol’ dears aren’t really talking about the basic unit of the digital picture.  Nope, they’re saying ‘pixie-lated’ and they mean someone who’s ‘away with the fairies’.

But it would be a pity to let the truth spoil such a good soundbite, eh?

George Pal’s 1960 film of H.G.Wells’ classic sci-fi story ‘The Time Machine’ has long been a favourite of mine. I’ve watched it dozens of times. But last week, on the train up to London, I spotted something new that I’d not noticed before.  There’s a scene where the Time Traveller stops in the year 1966, amazingly, on the very day that the world gets destroyed by atomic war (what are the odds of that?).

It wasn’t the awful ‘burnt toy cars floating in red porridge’ end of the world special effects. No – it was something in a shop window that caught my eye: the world’s first ‘tubeless TV’.  Not bad for a film made in 1960!

I can’t help thinking how much it looks like an iMac.

Lets investigate.

First, there’s this picture which I’m told is of a man sunbathing in the snow on Daytona Beach.  Suspicious.

Second, there are several blog reports here, here, here, here, here (lols), and here as well as Flickr photosets that seem to show that it has, indeed, been snowing in the Sunshine State.

It could just be a moment of madness showing up as a Google trend.  Mind you, I’ve just been for a walk with my cat in the thick snow in the UK, so anything’s possible I suppose.

Personally, I believe the Daytona Beach News Journal.  If anyone should know, they should.

Snow in Florida.  Who would have believed it?

Can you believe it?

I saw this news item on BBC website and immediately clicked, expecting (not unreasonably) to see a monster tuna.  All I got was some stock photography of a tuna processing plant.  I went to Google but couldn’t find any pictures, anywhere.  Just more text reports and fishery shots – like this.  What??  A story without a picture?  What’s that worth?  Like, er, nothing?  According to the BBC, their fish weighed ‘nearly four times as much as the average Japanese man’ so, in the absence of any real pictures, I thought I’d help out with my mock-up.

The whole thing smells fishy to me.  I mean, you wouldn’t believe your mate if he came back from fishing with a story about the 232kg fish that got away, would you?

So imagine my surprise to Google this – a 268kg tuna, pictured next to a small kid.  Hang on BBC – that’s 36kg bigger than your ‘record breaking’, invisible, monster.

I know which story I believe.

This is going viral on YouTube – and no surprise. The fact that the software / hardware can’t identify Black Desi but happily tracks and follows White Wanda is quite amazing. In the video, Desi is good humoured (if a little surprised).

In the wider world, however, this of course raises some big questions about the unchallenged assumptions that are what we mean when we say ‘institutionalised racism’. Whether or not it’s the truth, it’s all too easy to imagine a cluster of young, white geeky guys developing this technology. If it is true, then it gives us a glimpse of an unconscious aspect of racism: that if we’re white, we just don’t just think about being black.

In terms of online reputation, how HP handles this from here on in will be telling – and hugely important. All I can say is that I hope they deal with it with the same mixture of lightness, seriousness and openness as Desi and Wanda did.

On first investigation, I can’t find much response from HP.  There is this… and Mashable goes into more detail here….  Mashable seems to just want to write it off as a technological failing.  I disagree. I think it’s more revealing than that.

And is anyone else surprised that HP didn’t respond in the same medium (YouTube) the way that Domino’s did over that infamous YouTube video?

Ok, so after about day 6 of trying last summer I just forgot about it and got on with my life.  Until someone sent me a link to Paul Walsh’s blog where he provides a link straight through to a ‘delete your account’ page.  This page is pretty much invisible if you’re trying to find it from inside Ecademy.  At least it was to me.

Not having used Ecademy for over 6 months, I followed the link and deleted my account.

On the one hand, you can’t blame them for hiding the ‘get me the hell out of here’ link.  Networking sites like Ecademy are all about ‘claimed numbers of members’ (however loose the definition of ‘member’ might be).  Sadly, it’s all about keeping those numbers up to convince advertisers and partners to part with money.

In reality, Ecademy’s ‘membership’ number was always hotly disputed by increasingly pesky self-styled sleuths whose investigations started to show how shockingly small a percentage of Ecademy’s claimed active members were actually that.  It became clear to anyone with a brain in the last couple of years that a large number (some even suggested a majority) of Ecademy’s members were completely inactive and had been since their addition to the system.

I’m not going to get into a discussion of why I didn’t find Ecademy useful or its increasingly spammy approach – there’s plenty of discussion online in other places if you’re interested.

So, around about day 180ish and I deleted my account.  Or did I?  Some say that if I were to go to Ecademy and try to sign in, I’d be through to my old account again Facebook-stylee.  I’ll let you know.