Sick and tired of the tiny handsets that come with your mobile phone.  Help is at hand.  Imagine pulling one out of your bag when you're on the train....genuis.

Now I've discovered baseball I've been hunting around for a suitable representation of the sport to play on Xbox.  The lucky Americans get half a dozen titles some of which are excellent, the latest ESPN Major League Baseball being of particular note, but here in Blighty and our superior PAL screens we get zip, nada, nothing, apart from the average All Star Baseball.  I shall continue digging. I've also been looking at the new Apple Airport Express hoping it could be a useful add on to the Mini iPod, but it seems not.  It is in short a wireless access point that allows you play music via iTunes on your laptop through any stereo system.  But Apple seems to have missed the point.  Firstly the Airport Express doesn’t come with any of the necessary cables, the laptop connects wirelessly but outputs from the AA to the stereo are by either standard audio or optical cables, so you need to buy those separately.  Secondly there’s no way to use an iPod in this setup which strikes me as a glaring omission.  Another thing that shows that Apple still don’t quite get it are the rather fabulous Apple Pro Speakers but guess what?  The sodding things don’t come with a standard 3mm jack so you can’t plug into a PC or wait for it...an iPod for gawds sake, only G4 iMac or Power Mac G4 users need bother.  Don’t get me wrong I love my Mini iPod but it’s little details that, as Merrill Chapman puts it, ensure Apple will remain “The worlds largest irrelevant $6 billion company”.

A survey in USA Today reckons American youth would rather keep their TV sets than their games consoles. No shit. Most of them play their consoles on a TV set and if that was taken away the console would be useless anyway. Seems simple enough to me.

Went to see the Seattle Mariners beat the Boston Red Sox 8 to 4 last night, great spectacle and fantastic atmosphere. I think I now understand the rules of Baseball as well. Go Mariners!!

I dislike two things about coming to America, especially the west coast. The jet lag and the TV. Try as I might when I come to Seattle the first night is lucky to see me past 9:00 the evening I get there and despite being knackered I'm them wide awake at 3:00 in the morning. If someone had a cure or a least some quack remedy please let me know. This neatly segways into American TV 'cos at 3:00am there's little else to do than flick on the TV in the hope there's something interesting to pass the time. At least I found out that it's 35 years today since man first landed on the moon and in 1976 'Viking One' landed on Mars.

Speaking of licensed property I've had experience with I heard an interview on the radio with Jonathon Frakes (he of Star Trek fame) who's directing the upcoming Thunderbirds movie. It's a fine line someone walks when turning such an iconic TV series into a Hollywood blockbuster and I really, really want to like this movie...sadly history isn't on his side. Fingers crossed eh?! OK off to the airport.

Eh...?  No Daleks in the new series of Dr Who?  Having had some experience with film and TV licensing it's easy to see how situations like this arise, but surely the BBC and Terry Nation's family could have come to some agreement.  Guess not...

It’s been a bit mad recently hence the lack of ‘bloggage’, but a few things are worth mentioning and hey it might provoke a reaction. The Butler Inquiry has probably slipped under most people’s radar but this is just what the politicians want to happen. It is I suggest rather important but like the Hutton Report before it does seem to blame things rather than people, as if process, systems and procedure have a life independent of human beings. I’m being kind by calling them cretins. The case for life on Mars, or at least there once was life on the red planet has been strengthened by the discovery of ammonia in the atmosphere. Ammonia has been found to be a building block for proteins and under the right conditions can then go on to form amino acids. Still no “Ack, ack, ack!” though. I’m off to Seattle on Sunday for a week and this time hope to take in the Space Needle and baseball game to see the Mariners take on the Boston Red Sox. Oh and I might even get some work done. The book “In Search of Stupidity” by Merrill Chapman is excellent and well worth a read. Highlights include the demise of Novell who’s adherence to the command line did for them in the end and IBM’s motorway pileup that was OS/2, an object lesson in having superior technology but committing every marketing faux pas known to man and a few others that weren’t. The key to success in the technology market isn’t as surprising as you might think. First put someone in charge who’s a geek or at least someone who loves and understands geeks, and make fewer mistakes than everyone else; easy really. No it is! Right I’m off to walk the dog…

Paradigm shift, bandwidth, leverage, On Demand Business. Words and phrases that ought to be banned by an act of Parliament and the consultants who thought they were a good idea should be taken outside and shot. We all try hard not to use them, but find ourselves drawn into the conspiracy that turns adjectives into nouns and creates phrases from a random selection of words. It made me smile when I found this, an add-on for Word and PowerPoint that links with the reading score tools and in theory helps eliminate business bullshit from your documents and presentations. It could also help create content free material as well if you felt so inclined. Can I be the only person to see the irony that it's a Consultancy that produced it?

A few days ago the Cassini-Huygens spacecraft fired its main engine to slow enough to be captured by the gravitation field of Saturn and so begin its 4 year tour of the ringed gas giant. Whilst in the neighbourhood it will also take in Titan and Saturn’s other moons Enceladus, Hyperion, Dione, Rhea and Iapetus. There’s a total of 77 orbits of Saturn planned as well as 44 of Titan, but more interesting is that on Christmas day Cassini with launch the Huygens probe towards Titan. 20 days later it will decent though Titan’s nitrogen rich atmosphere and hopefully after a two and half hour parachute ride touch down on the surface, if everything goes well they may get up to 30 minutes more data before the batteries run out. The hope is that Huygens will take more than 1000 images as if floats above the moons surface and a few more if it survives the landing. What’s mind boggling about this mission is that distance the spacecraft has covered. Saturn is almost twice as far from Earth than Jupiter, some 13 billion kilometres as opposed to 750 million. In reality they are two unfeasibly large distances none of us can truly comprehend. And my brain just melts at how you fire a space craft the size of a small bus at a planet that far away and get it to drop off a probe on an orbiting moon whilst it’s there. I guess that’s why they call it rocket science.

Well the weekend threw us a few surprises, sports wise anyway. Serena Williams was soundly beaten by the number thirteen seed Maria Sharapova in the ladies final at Wimbledon. As Ms Sharapova is the most photogenic female tennis player since a certain Anna I can hear the tabloid lens men polishing their telephotos as I type this. The key difference between them as I see it is that Sharapova is a world class tennis player whilst Kournikova isn’t. I never thought I’d ever say it but well done to the Greeks for winning Euro 2004 and showing us that you don’t have to have a team of over paid prima donnas to win a major tournament. Sadly as Alan Hanson mentioned England have never had a better chance to win the European Cup and probably won’t again for sometime, yes I know a dopey Swiss ref robbed of a place in the semi final but lets be honest we didn’t really deserve it. Now all the Greeks have to do is finish off the Olympic buildings which I have on good authority is pretty unlikely. Oh and Spain was excellent.