Over the years man has undertaken some seemingly insurmountable challenges. A few years ago someone wearing a monocle probably looked to the sky one evening and said to his associate at the men's club, "you know old chap, I think one day our boys will fly to that glorious bright crated globe up there in some sort of flying vessel and land on it."
Of course, his gentlemanly acquaintance, Cyril, will have spluttered out his brandy in uncontrollable horror, aghast at such a proclamation of unattainable fantasy, before branding his former friend a witch and sentencing him to forty lashes. But, as we now know, Cynical Cyril would have been proved very wrong.
Similarly, ten million years ago when God's human prototypes, monkeys, ruled the Earth (obviously), if one of them had shrilled to the other, "hey, you mark my words, in a few million years we'll be able to talk quietly and walk upright," he would have been beaten to death with his banana.
Yet here I am. Plus, if I get 999 of my friends together we'll eventually be able to write some Shakespeare. But those things are nothing compared to a man's greatest test, a test I'm about to undertake; growing a beard.
I've tried to grow a beard a few times before, and each time I've failed before I hit the two week mark due to uncontrollable itching and the recurring realisation that someone in my family was ginger. I've got nothing against strawberry blonde at all, but I fail to understand where this ginger facial growth, in stark contrast to my hair, comes from.
Regardless, this time I'm determined. I was at my friend's baby dedication soiree last week when the topic of conversation turned to beards and my friend, Heidi, jokingly suggested I should grow one. My curiosity coupled with an interest in undertaking an extreme challenge prompted me to take up the bushy gauntlet.
Then a few days ago it dawned on me that I didn't have to do it alone, so I decided to share my experience with the world by keeping a public journal of life with a beard. I'm calling it my Brilliantly Excellent Accessible Regular Diary, or BEARD. So keep checking for updates over the next six weeks or so, because after that I'll probably get rid of it to avoid upsetting my wife too much, and to avoid having spare change thrown at me by passers by.
I had my final shave on Monday, a proper thorough one which harnessed the full power of my Mach3 Nitro, prior to letting the scratching commence. It'll be an arduous journey, but I'm chasing the dream and nobody said it would be easy. All the most noble and distinguished men in the world have beards, men like Abraham Lincoln, ZZ Top, and Giant Haystacks, so the way I see it at least if I'm judged by my cover I'll be considered wise and honourable.
Ok then, here I go. I'm away to buy some sandals and some light brown socks.
How many games consoles does it take to heal the world?
According to this article the PS3 will not only be the premier games system to own come Christmas, it'll also be helping find a cure for Alzheimer's and other diseases thanks to its vast processing capabilities. Apparently, linking 10,000 PlayStation 3s together will create a computer capable of a thousand trillion calculations per second which can be used to research protein folding in the human body.
Proteins in the body that don't fold correctly are understood to cause diseases including Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and various cancers, although it is not known how or why this process occurs. Unfortunately, the average PC, according to the BBC, would take 10,000 days to simulate just one fold, a fold which would take ten millionths of a second in the body. Intel ought to be ashamed of themselves.
At present the solution is to link thousands of computers together, harnessing their spare processing ability so that each can undertake a fraction of the calculations needed to simulate a fold, before pulling the data together via the magic of the interweb. Scientists can then view multiple simulations relatively quickly to ultimately find cures for the diseases.
Cynical marketing stunt based on a technological coincidence, or genuinely benevolent scientific pioneering on the part of Sony, then? Hmm. Nonetheless, Sony claim to be working on a piece of protein folding software that will run on the PS3 when it's launched later this year. Furthermore, the PS3's graphics chip, 'designed for advanced gaming', will eventually support a graphical interface that will allow scientists to 'view the protein from different angles as it folds in real time.'
Er, real time? Please tell me if I'm being stupid here, but did I not just read that a fold takes place in ten millionths of a second? I hope the interface has a slow motion function. In any case, I'm sure a PC graphics card will come out soon which will be able to draw the protein a nano-fraction smoother, making the PS3's life-saving capabilities a bit rubbish and pointless anyway. In the meantime, though, PS3 owners have a reason to feel good about themselves while they're swearing through their headsets at hapless German adolescents for pummeling them 4-0 with FC Weder Lufthausen on Pro Evo Online.
It might be overpriced and underpowered, but the PS3 could save your child's life one day, so be careful what you say about it, ok. By the way, I heard Nintendo were approached about using Wii, but after linking 25,000 of them together the resultant supercomputer, codenamed NintenCure, still couldn't work out how to stop a nose bleed. They had a lot of fun trying though, much more than they'd had with the PS3, and it was really simple to operate too.
Watch out for the Apple version, iProtein Pro, which will make the proteins dance as well as fold, all right out of the box.
You know, I think that to bore people more than I have already about my new baby would be to commit a crime against cool, and I've never done that before in my life, not once. I can even refer to myself in the third person, like, "M Dawggg wants a fawty," and retain my dignity. For M Dawggg to go on about his new found wireless networking capabilities, Intel Core Duo power, DVD Superdrive and Magsafe power cable would be wack, so he won't.
What I will say, though, is that this magic box I'm typing on now (really badly - stupid tiny keyboard) is, I reckon, built mostly for MySpace use. It has a little camera above the screen which seems to serve no purpose at all other than to pout at and take photos of yourself with, which is exactly what EVERYONE on MySpace does. Why, M Dawggg asks himself? How come everyone on MySpace has this overwhelming urge to grab a camera, hold it in front of them as far as they can reach, usually from above, and pout? Anyway, with this thing I can do that with both hands free, leaving me able to do other things, like enjoy a brew:
You'll note that I can add zany effects to my picture for that touch of class. I won that cup for being Angel of the Month at Office Angels, by the way, and like I said to a friend recently, when I drink out of it I know exactly what it must be like to drink champagne out of the FA Cup, sipping from the chalice of achievement.
Anyway, I didn't write this so I could pout into my iSight camera (see what they did there?) or to tell you about the tiny remote control I can operate it with, but to spread some sensational irony. I came here to self-indulgently lament self-indulgence on this blog because of the season in my life I'm about to go into, the season that prompted me to ditch desktop dallying and opt for mobile, er, movement. What I'm saying is that I'll shortly be doing far more by way of purposeful writing, leaving me with far less time to splatter the kind of inwardly-focussed verbal diarrhea I usually deposit on this page. As such there are two was my blog life could go:
1. It could die.
2. It could become a more purposeful and interesting pursuit, tied inextricably with the 'proper' writing I'm doing at any given time, making it more useful for me and more entertaining (hopefully) for you.
As always, a number two is more satisfying than a number one.
I need to be real, however, and stress that this could all be folly because I might turn out to be a bit rubbish when it comes to the crunch and find myself devoid of any meaningful journalistic nous. One thing I'm certain of is that come September I'll be busier, but whether I'll be able to bag some decent writing assignments is anyone's guess. There are some cool things on the horizon though, so I'll just have to play my cards right and see what happens. I need to learn how to use this keyboard properly for a start.
When I wrote the blog preceding this one I knew I'd need a laptop at some point before going back to university in September. I also knew I liked Macs, and now so do you, but I didn't think my dream would become a reality so imminently and be so glorious in splendor. But, shrewd financial wheeling and dealing in association with my friends at The Student Loan Company has afforded me the luxury of purchasing a shiny new Intel based 2.0GHz MacBook. And I'm excited. Very excited.
Instead of yacking now I'll wait until I pick it up then bore you with it properly. Watch this space.
In the meantime, look at the shiny picture an be happy for me. I think it has a flux capacitor.
So I think it's time to throw my cards on the table, or rather my hardware. I use a Mac and I love it. In fact, so desperate was I to get my hands on one that I bought a base level eMac at a price which would have afforded me a well-specced PC, one that would have lasted a good, oh, three months before becoming obsolete. And five before spyware rendered it totally unusable.
I love Macs because I'm a real person, by which I mean that I choose a personal computer in the same way I choose any other luxury item. Firstly, of course, I think, 'will it look good on me/near me?' Then I wonder, 'will it work?' And only then do I think, 'and can I afford it?' So, when I want to buy a car, the answer to the first two questions points me to a Lamborghini, but the safety net third question takes me straight to the used car lot at Reg Vardy. In our post-modern, material driven, celebrity-ridden age, true happiness is removal of the third question entirely, but sadly that's not the case for most of us.
I know very little about computers really, but when I came to buy one, Apple seemed to offer me a positive response to each of my three commodity questions, outworked as follows:
1. Do I prefer the shiny white, compact, sweet looking, fully integrated single unit Mac or the huge grey slab of noisy plastic accompanied by a mass of cables, a tiny monitor, twenty software discs and eight uselessly inaccessible USB ports ?
2. Which will I be more likely to have to pull apart under the instruction of a call centre worker in India at a cost of £1 per second because my files have disappeared? Again.
3. My last PC cost £1,000 plus anti-virus software, a firewall and call charges to Asia. That good looking white thing is £200 cheaper even after I buy Microsoft Office. Why am I even thinking about this?
So minutes after walking into John Lewis I was walking out with a Mac under my arm. Even the box looked cool.
The hilarious thing about the Mac vs. PC debate is that people bothered enough to argue about it always battle over specs, operating systems, processing speeds, software stability and games. Who cares? All I asked of my new purchase was that it let me print a letter and find out quickly when another hot celebrity buys a tiny dog, yet it's now in danger of becoming my actual best friend. My wife thinks it is already. My eMac has been discontinued now, yet to this day it allows me to do those things quickly and efficiently, plus I can edit a film, download a song, upload a photo, transfer anything into my PSP and record songs. All straight out of the box, all easily, and all with only one button on my mouse. Phew.
It seems to me that Apple know what most people want from a personal computer, the same way as they know what people want from a portable music player; something that looks good, is easy to use and works properly. Sadly, not many regular people know much about Macs yet, but hopefully Apple's marketing department will catch up with its design team shortly. Their latest ad campaign is a start, I suppose:
Yes, they're quite haughty, and yes, after you've watched a couple they get a bit annoying. But, they've ENRAGED the PC crowd, and that can only be a good thing, if only to provide some tech-tastic comedy spleen venting on the forums. Here's a brutal parody by someone who loves his graphics cards:
...And I'm gonna go play Burnout with a real person I can see who can't lie to me about their gender. LOL, as they say.
The thing is, most people don't really NEED a computer, do they? But computers can perform such amazing wizardry these days that we choose to spend our lives making them impress us ever more. I don't need to transfer my CD collection into iTunes, don't need to make short films about my band, don't need to write this blog, but I like to because it's all made easy for me. I'm sure that 95% of people who own computers, including me, couldn't give a monkeys how their computer actually does stuff. Most couldn't care less about their clock speed and MB of RAM, but if the magic box will allow them to knock together a comedy home movie one day and a slideshow of their cruise to Magaluf the next, they're satisfied. If it'll do that while taking up minimal space, being quiet, not crashing and, most importantly, looking cool, that's just dandy. My Mac does all that really well. My PC didn't.
Macs are computers for style-conscious computer-illiterate buffoons. And designers. They're for people like me, who cringe at the thought of knowing what a Java Applet is, whose only knowledge of HTML code is < br > and who think a CODEC is what your dad takes pictures with. People with games consoles. Argh.
See, before I bought my little bundle of joy I operated two PCs, my own and my dad's. Both sucked, and sucked badly. You already know that I had to take mine apart and phone a call centre, which is to know enough. And my dad's. Oh dear. It spat its dummy out within ten minutes of being first switched on and never picked it up again. I used it a couple of weeks ago and, I'm not kidding, it took about fifteen minutes to turn it on and open internet explorer. Fifteen minutes. I think he only persists with it to annoy me.
But I fear that I'm getting too close to all out PC-bashing territory now, which would land me in hot water because I wouldn't have a prayer in a spec war with a hardcore PC-upgrading Mac playa hater. I'm blissfully ignorant. Intel Shmintel, I say. If you're happy with your PC, hey, I ain't mad atcha, you just keep perpetratin' those right-click drive-bys on the Mac crew and I'm not going to argue. The point I'm trying to make here is that most people just want the coolest stuff they can get these days, and the coolest stuff right now is the stuff Steve Jobs and his posse are making. If the good looking thing happens to have a bit about it under the surface too, great. Why do you think Carol Vorderman is so popular?
Here's my vision of the future. The iPod Generation, or whatever you care to label them (I prefer 'neo-walkmanites'), will be buying computers for themselves soon. Obviously that's discounting all the older people who bought iPods and hooked them up to their PCs like plugging a guitar into a hi-fi. Once the younger ones get spending on their very own MySpace Facilitators, PCs will become the new Macs - a misunderstood minority group, except without the cachet and the backing of dancing pop stars.
Apple, on the other hand, will be stemming a tide of viruses instead of making software that works properly and ruing the day they put form ahead of function. How are you supposed to shoot aliens on your typewriter when your mouse has only got one button?
Meanwhile, Half-life will move exclusively to PlayStation 4 and Nintendo's new console, the Pu, will aim squarely at the lucrative and untapped 65-90 age bracket with an innovative novelty control device shaped like a walking stick.
As Yoda allegedly said to Luke: Once Mac you go, never back you'll go.
