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.

I love German, don’t you?  A real ’say-it-like-it-is’ construction kit of a language.  They don’t piss about with euphemisms and veiled descriptions for things.  They just bolt together enough words to get the job done (in the order that they think of them).

Business directory scams? “Address book swindlers” more like!

Fantastiche!

So says the Evening Standard headline I spotted at Paddington tonight. I love headlines – especially when they’re so deliciously over the top.

‘Swine flu kills healthy people’ is ’stating the bleedin’ obvious’ as Basil Fawlty might have said. It’s also the journalistic equivalent of ‘Defcon 4′. Logjcally, there’s only one place to go after that headline. “Official: End Of World”.

But it’s not just the apocalyptic that amuses me but those damn headlines that catch your eye like a virus you can never quite get rid of. Ones like the surreal and inexplicably pleasing “Fish Spillage”.

Years later, I still find myself trying to picture that event.

I got interrupted with a Skype IM spammer earlier today.  You know, one of those guys who happens to be holding the countless millions of dollars left to you by the brother you never knew you had?

I thought I’d send a quick response summarising my feelings.  So I did – and got a chirpy reply back.  How nice.  Who said these scammers don’t have at least a sense of humour!

And that name rings a bell, too.

I picked this piece up on the NASA site via Twitter (following Astronautics).

Moral of this story is: don’t give up, you’ll get there eventually.

When Alan Shepard was asked what was going through his mind sitting on the launch pad at the Cape in his Mercury capsule, his answer was ‘The fact that every part of this ship was built by the lowest bidder.’ (Interestingly, John Glenn also said the same thing many years later after his return to space aboard the Shuttle).

What would be going through my mind?  That my spaceship’s been put together by people who can’t spell meteorite.