Badly Done

I don't like to get political, but news that Downing Street approved the release of the monster partly responsible for blowing up the plane over Lockerbie has me pretty cross.

I'm not going to get cute with this post. I just want to say that although I wasn't directly affected, one thing stays with me about this act of terrorism: So many of the victims were returning from their overseas studies in London. I can't say how many people I know who went through that program. Of course, every tragedy like this has its victims and none are more special than any other.

But those students returning from the semester abroad, that's what gets me.

Skype, I Love You

Wow. I just looked at the date of the last post. No excuses ... I just took a break and I'm sure I alienated my wonderful audience. Let's see how this goes.

I had a great experience in the interim, doing business with some great friends in the UK. Most of it was email, but a lot of it was done via Skype. These guys had Skype enabled on their phone -- in their words, the equipment was "nothing as posh as an iPhone." It just came on their regular handset. Now that is civilized. Of course, they had to know I was calling and have it turned on, so I mostly did "Skype Out," but that's still only 5 cents a minute or something. So much better than the bad old days.

We even did something very revolutionary: I needed to do a video shoot there, and my thought was to have a Skype video conference so I could see and hear the interview subject. That didn't happen due to the lack of WiFi in the the remote Western pub we were shooting in, but they were able to SMS ("text") some photos, which helped a great deal.

We are getting closer. There's only one final frontier that no one seems to be even willing to discuss: the time difference. No matter what you do, the sun is going to rise there at a different time that it does here. If the world were to switch over to Universal Time (UT), then someone would have to start getting used to waking up at 03:00.

And guess what, UT is just another way of saying Greenwich Mean Time. With the way the metric system went over here, good luck. And having London be the de facto center of everything (in that the sun will rise at 06:00 and set at 19:00, depending on the season)? This might take a while.