The case for electronics by Darren
If you have asked for any kind of toy this Christmas the likelihood of it being an electrical device is extremely high. In recent years this statement would have only held weight when talking about men and the latest must-have gadgets. However products such as the Nintendo DS are now attracting woman and other sections of society including the older generations. This is great and hopefully signals the end of the annual Christmas 4 hour Monopoly game or the egregiously annoying Ludo.

I have refrained from asking Rene what the latest toy he has bought is for fear of the response, but if he had any perspicacity at all it would have been something that requires a power source. Being of a certain age Rene loquaciously recalls with joy the wooden train set he was given in the sixties and the abacus that served him so well through the last recession. However we are in a digital age now and there is something to be had for everybody, whether it be a HDTV, a netbook or even an iPhone. So this year gather around the TV and play a game of Wii Sports watching your relatives flail around aimlessly rather than building a Lego castle, only to find you are missing the final two pieces.

The case for traditional by Rene
In this day and age the appetite for electronic media is immense, and while I don’t have a massive problem with ‘grown up’ kids spoiling each other with iPhones, PlayStations or SatNavs; I do think there is a real danger for future generations if parents and relatives are to succumb to demands from children for the latest electronic gadgets (each of which will no doubt be old news by this time next year).

I guess it is this unstoppable pace of technological development that is central to my issue with giving electronics gifts for Christmas. Surely Christmas is a time for tradition? And traditional gifts such as a boy’s first football, rugby ball, or team shirt (I would list some girls toys here, but won't for fear of being ridiculed or un-PC), are things that a child will remember forever, and will undoubtedly help form them as a person, and will ultimately act as encouragement to engage with healthy outdoor activities. After all, outdoor activities can help children to develop in all kinds of ways, and you never know, you might just be gifting the next Ronaldo his first football. But I sincerely doubt that the gift of a Wii will do much more other than see the living room destroyed by a hyper active child.

There is also a huge cost issue associated with electronic toys, and as we head into the grips of a recession many won't be able to afford such expensive gifts. Isn’t it the thought that counts after all? So without signing off and leaving myself sounding like ba humbug, I guess what I’m saying is computers are now part of everyday life, but there are also great pleasures to be had from more traditional gifts that don't cost the earth or only exist in a virtual world.

I was reading a tender the other day and it asked for experience in the following: SOAP, REST, SR/W, atom syndication, semantic Web, RDF, data aggregation, AJAX, federated identity management (Shibboleth, OpenID), user centred design, metadata taxonomies and folksonomies, service orientated architecture… and the list went on. I was immediately put off attempting to write a response to this. The fact is I have experience in all these areas but would never categorise these skills into such ridiculous tags. Can there be anymore meaningless terms than “user centred design” and “service orientated architecture”? Maybe they were worried we would design the solution for a cyborg in mind with code optimised for an Atari 2600.

Let's take “metadata taxonomies and folksonomies”. In essence what this actually is, is a website owner creating categories for you and you assigning one to any content you upload vs. you tagging your content yourself using whatever words you see fit, i.e. blog tagging. So to clarify: the Playgroup site has a metadata folksonomy. Absolute nonsense - when people start using these phrases it's difficult to take them seriously.

On Wednesday I decided to look into improving our office Internet connection; at the moment we have a 2Mb line for 50+ people and it's painful. easynet sent me some information on “SureStream” - their next big thing. On the first page the following acronyms/phrases where found: HDSL multiplexing, SDH, NOC and SNMP (there were others as well but I was familiar with those). I'm not a network administrator and all this was nonsensical to me. I gave up half way through.

Finally this week I found myself writing a user manual for a piece of software we have just finished developing. It is called SICAMS (my predecessor named it); no one in the agency knew what it stood for. This is being rolled out to 200 car dealerships next Monday and we are sitting down trying to work out what the “I” stands for. Abbreviations can lead to mass confusion: another product, EDMAPI (again I didn't name it), stands for Electronic Direct Marketing API (Application Programming Interface) and is pronounced E-D-M-A-P-I. The account handlers like to call it E-D-MAPPY, despite my constant corrections they can't get their heads around it. Maybe it sounds friendlier but when the client starts saying it as well you just have to cringe.

Full article: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-charles-as-president-not-in-my-name-1026170.html

Snippet:

Despite the most expensive education money can buy, he managed only to scrape a B and a C in his A-Levels. Despite this, he was admitted to Cambridge University, where he failed again, barely scraping a 2:2. When he was ushered into the Navy, he was so inept at navigation he kept crashing. Anybody else would have been court-martialled, but instead the Navy gave him one-on-one tuition for years. And still he failed.

And what of his arguments? They are garbled, uninformed, cliché-ridden repetitions of what the last person who spoke to him said. His very sympathetic biographer Dimbleby admits that his staff “were uncomfortable with his tendency to reach instant conclusions on the basis of insufficient thought”. Edward Adeane, Charles’ private secretary for many years, was disturbed by the fact that “Charles was extraordinarily easy to lead by the nose”.

What do these “interventions” really consist of? Charles Windsor scorns modern science, attacking it for its “lack of soul” and for “playing God”. So he uses his position to attack qualified life-saving professionals who earned their position, like the General Medical Council - and says he knows better.

He demands that the NHS pay for “spiritual, alternative medicine”, and has been a key player in ensuring the NHS now spends £200m a year on it. But as Professor Richard Dawkins explains, there is no such thing as “alternative” medicine. If a treatment works in clinical trials, it ceases to be “alternative”: it is classified as medicine and prescribed by doctors. So “alternative medicine” is - by definition - medicine that doesn’t work in clinical trials. It is not medicine at all.

Charles’s other arguments have just as much merit. Even on the (rare) occasions when he is right, Charles wrecks it with rancid hypocrisy. His claims to be opposed to global warming would be more persuasive if he were not one of the worst personal polluters in Britain, using a private jet for the most trivial of trips. His claims to be concerned for the poor would be more persuasive if he did not claim more than £300m of public land that should be used to pay for schools and hospitals to fund his own shocking decadence.

Everything about the show is over the top and cringeworthy. From the inappropriate use of O Fortuna as background music to introduce the judges to the painful arguments that erupt between them. It all seems to revolve around these 4 people who are extremely nauseating. Walsh who thinks Girls Aloud and Westlife are something to boast about and Simon Cowell who has introduced us to Robson and Jerome, Zig and Zag and the Teletubbies, are the worst. If you ever wondered why the music industry is in such a state look no further than these two.

And what happens to the winners each year? Apart from Will Young none of them have done anything of note. I think the show should just tour the country for the funny acts that we can all have a laugh at and stop pretending it’s something that it isn’t.

Diageo: Johnnie Walker advert

An old advert but great nonetheless. For a more recent advert from Diageo, which is also great, check this link out:
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=a9EMUDkNHFo

Microsoft: I’m a PC

Microsoft have hit exactly the right tone with this ad. All the Apple “I’m a Mac” adverts were awful.

Nintendo: Wii experience

You have to load the page to get the full experience:
http://uk.youtube.com/experiencewii

A great piece of marketing from a highly creative and innovative company.