Music and movie companies are failing their markets and their shareholders. I can’t legitimately get most of the music I want in a high quality lossless format, yet I can be criminalised for attempting to obtain it by other means. I’m a regular purchaser from online retailers who stock albums in a 24/96 FLAC or better format, but most record company back catalogue isn’t available. I don’t want the expense or effort of investing in a transcription turntable and chasing pristine vinyl – and I certainly don’t want to buy and store CDs – but I’m happy to pay a premium price for the music I want in a decent format. I already spend hundreds of dollars a year on high quality legal downloads; if the titles were available I could easily spend thousands. Yet while music distributors wring their hands about the decline of CD sales they do nothing to meet the changing market beyond making limited catalogue available in lossy low-quality formats. Yes, I understand they and their movie counterparts are grieving the demise of highly lucrative vertically-integrated industries, but it’s past time they got over that and adapted to the new realities of digital distribution. Sites like Megauploads are not the problem, they’re a symptom. Removing them won’t make things better for music and movie companies; it will only breed further resentment. In 2012 it’s no longer possible to force customers into your optimal business model, but there are expansive opportunities for those who will give customers what they want.

Google was down this morning. For what seemed like an hour there was no Google search, no GMail, no Libraries API, Calendar or Google+. My partner initially thought the internet had disappeared, but I couldn’t see the problem until I refreshed my Google Calendar. While admiring Google’s innovation, I’ve always been wary of putting all my eggs in the GBasket. I routinely use another search engine, host my own primary email account and don’t build web apps that rely on the Libraries API. Sure, I do have a backup GMail account and I’m intrigued by Google+, but my only real GDependency is Google Calendar, and after today’s outage I’m chasing some redundancy for that. For me, Google is too large and obvious a target for cyberterrorism. It’s an amazing company with some powerful products, but it’s potentially a single point of failure. While I’m sure the Mountainview team has thorough and practiced recovery strategies, I want to continue working even when Google stops.

While in Europe, two simple dishes I particularly enjoyed were bruschetta and patatas bravas. While visiting Auckland this week I spied both dishes on the menu of a cafe in the Viaduct Harbour. The flavours of Italy and Spain flooded back, and I ordered both without hesitation. I was dismayed at what I was served. The bruschetta was soggy: it had been thickly piled with vegetables before being topped with cheese and grilled. The patatas bravas were so coarsely cut they resembled wedges and, perhaps unsurprisingly, had been smothered with salsa and cheese. Should I mention the prawns coated in glutinous sauce strong enough to ensure all the native flavours were obliterated? Perhaps not. In all cases, great effort had been invested to make simple, light and delicious food stodgy and boringly similar. Presumably the menu was constructed to appeal to the New Zealand palate; if so the New Zealand palate requires some re-education. It’s not necessary to serve everything with cheese, New Zealand.

The New Zealand government introduced Food Bill 160-2 into parliament in May 2010. It was referred to the appropriate select committee in July of that year and hasn’t yet returned to the chamber for a second reading. A full year later the local blogosphere began to resonate with opposition to the admittedly draconian scope and provisions of the proposed legislation, and issues raised by the Green Party’s Sue Kedgley resulted in undertakings from the responsible Minister that key definitions in the bill would be revised. The galling reasonableness of Kate Wilkinson’s reply appeared only to fan the flames of opposition: on-line petitions now claim that the government will sneak the bill into law over summer, despite its need for a second reading in the New Zealand House of Representatives which is in recess. My point? The bill as it was written eighteen months ago is not well-drafted and the apocalyptic language of many opponents goes with the territory. What I find curious is the twelve months that elapsed between the bill’s select committee referral and the visibility of any opposition. If Food Bill 160-2 really is this troubling, what hope is there for democratic protest in New Zealand if it can sail below the horizon for more than a year?

It’s become fashionable to hate Christmas. Moaning about the stress of the season, groaning about the music playing in the shops: the negative voices are the same in the media and on the streets. Alternative opinions seem rare this year, but I have one. I love Christmas. I love the whole Jesus-in-a-manger, gifts-under-the-tree, family-coming-together affair, from the first glint of tinsel to the last lick of Christmas pudding. Yes, I loathe the crass commercialism that surrounds the event, but I manage to avoid most of that. What I seem unable to avoid this year are the pervasive voices of the grinches and naysayers whose palpable bitterness steals some of the joy for those of us who don’t share their misanthropic view of the occasion. Shame on them. I intend to enjoy the day anyway.

Congratulations to Harold Kung and his team at Northwestern University in the USA. They’ve re-engineered the lithium-ion battery to give it ten times the current capacity, while also reducing its charge time to one tenth the current duration. This will mean smartphone batteries that last a week and can be charged in fifteen minutes, cars with a 2,500km range that can be charged in an hour. Within the next five years this breakthrough will change the way we design and use battery-driven devices. Now if we can just make these batteries easy to recycle …

Since I started my business it’s been heavily integrated with Skype. Apart from email, all client communication happens through Skype, including my business phone number. For this reason each new Skype version has been greeted with trepidation; it’s not that I don’t like change, I just don’t want to lose usability. With 5.5.0 Skype has finally annoyed me sufficiently to seriously plan for an alternative. I don’t care about the new Facebook integration; I don’t have to enable it. But Skype 5.5.0 no longer remembers its preferred on-screen location between sessions, at least on my multi-monitor set up. And it insists on displaying a large advertising screen when it’s launched: Skype calls this the Home screen although it appears to serve no useful purpose. It seems Skype now aspires to be a core component in my on-line life, but repurposing itself risks losing the important specialised role it’s held until now. For me Skype is a utility. I only ask that it does its job consistently and unobtrusively. I can build my own bells, I can buy my own whistles. Stick to your knitting, Skype.

No service. That’s what we were served on Saturday evening at a restaurant in central Wellington. When we entered we were handed menus and told to seat ourselves anywhere we wished; something of a departure from previous visits to what has been a favourite spot for casual dining. We chose a table. We sat and waited. We read the menus and waited. We wondered what the specials of the day were … and waited. The restaurant was no more than half full and well staffed, but no-one approached to greet us or offer us drinks. Eventually we felt we’d waited enough. I’ve known someone to stand on the table and yell “what do you have to do to get some service in here?”, but we weren’t that demonstrative. We left quietly – the staff at The Lido didn’t seem to notice.

A common cold remedy provides the user with colour coded tablets; white to take during the day, orange for the night. The product’s packaging also differentiates day from night – by using an orangy-red for the day and blue for the night, both on a white background. Of course one should never take medication without checking the instructions, but this lack of design consistency lets slip an obvious opportunity to reinforce the directions. Colour coding the packaging to match the tablets would have been a smart way to minimise consumer confusion.

This week I’ve talked with two supermarket checkout operators who were obviously suffering terribly from the ‘flu currently spreading in this New Zealand mid-winter. Both were unable to take time off work because they had no available sick leave and couldn’t afford to lose the income. As a consequence they were putting all their customers at risk. Given the effort by the Ministry of Health to limit the spread of influenza, it seems completely wrong that we should allow infected workers to be face to face with thousands of people in the five to seven days when the virus is at its most communicable. Logically, paying public-facing ‘flu sufferers to stay home is more cost-effective than almost any other influenza management strategy. Is there a pragmatic reason we don’t publicly fund such a strategy, or is this a philosophically-driven oversight?