Dan McNeil's Blog

The end of a decade is usually a time for reflection. Working in the mobile industry, I’m surrounded by phones and read lots of blog postings about how mobile phones have changed, and how the iPhone brought to the public consciousness the idea of adding applications to a phone to add functionality to it. But the mobile phone itself has changed other things in our lives, which have changed the way we interact with people in more subtle ways. For instance, almost all of the time, you see the number of the person calling you when you get a call these days. And pretty often, they’ll be in your contacts, so you’ll actually get to see who it is. I’ve become so used to the idea that you know who’s calling you before you pick up the phone, I can hardly remember the sensation of picking up the phone and saying “hello?” without knowing who is on the other end. I have a variety of ways of saying “hello” depending on who’s calling me. There’s a “hello” for people I speak to regularly, a “...

2009 was notable for the fact that nobody particularly famous died over the Christmas period.  Every year, there seems to be an expectation that at least one or two famous people will die during the Christmas holidays.  That got me thinking.  I’m pretty sure that people die every day of the year, but statistically, just how many famous people would you expect to die during the Christmas holidays? According to the figures I found online, around 1% of the world’s population die every year.  Let’s presume that figure is the same for celebrities as for the population in general. Secondly, we need to know how many famous people are there.  There are around 30,000 entries in Who's Who . If we presume that a quarter of them are “famous” but that we can think of the same number again of people who are “famous” but aren’t in “Who’s Who” – the kind of people who are on Celebrity Big Brother, for instance, then we end up with around 15,000 famous people. Feels about ri...

2009 wasn’t a great year.  I don’t seem to be the only one saying so, either.  But still it’s gone now, and although the whole concept of numbering the years is arbitrary, the reset of the annual clock to 1 does give an opportunity to draw a line and make a few changes. So far, 2010 has been “cold with a flutter of snow” but I expect there’ll be some sunshine along the way at some point. In the summer, our local station reopens again after nearly three years (East London Line Extension) giving us direct access to Dalston, Croydon and Crystal Palace from our local station.  Lovely.  That’ll be useful, then. But before that, we get the second part of Doctor Who: End of Time – starring a blonde John Simm as a rather deranged Master and Timothy Dalton as a spitting Time Lord.  I actually enjoyed the first episode on Christmas Day, my only concern is that in order to undo the “Master Race” thing, there’s going to be a reset and we’ve had a few too many resets ...

I don’t watch horror films late at night.  It’s not because I believe that the poltergeists or demons or Gremlins are going to creep into my room at night (was Gremlins a horror film?) but it’s because I don’t trust my mind and what it can do to make things real in my dreams. I’m a rational person with no belief in the supernatural, but nobody appears to have passed that message to the part of my brain which writes the scripts for my dreams.  Last night, I woke up in the middle of the night and glanced over at the curtain. The lights of London were coming in through the blinds and making shapes on the light-coloured curtains in front.  I looked at the curtains and said to myself “that shadow looks a bit like a person” and was awake enough to rationalise in my head that if I were a less rational person, I could easily mistake those shadows in the half-light for a ghostly figure standing in the corner of the room. Can you guess what happened after I fell asleep again?...

The mind plays tricks on us, we all know that. For years, I had a song going around in my head – except it was only the line “Falling apart, because I know I’ve lost my guardian angel” going around and around in my head. A week or two ago, I tracked it down on Amazon and bought it. This is where my memory had deceived me. In my mind, this was a famous song from the 80s which surely everyone knew. I always found it very strange that I seemed to be the only person who remembered that line, and was sure that everyone else was just pretending to be oblivious to this song. Here is the song, courtesy of YouTube. You even get to look at some cheesy pictures of angels whilst it’s playing… … isn’t it awful? A little time spent on Google reveals that this is not the only version of the song. It exists in a couple of cover versions. First up, here’s Nino De Angelo… … isn’t that worse than the first one? Finally, in that horrible modern trend of taking songs from the eight...

It’s been far too long since I’ve written in here.  Almost every entry I write begins with those words and so I presume there’s a message in there somewhere; I should write more often.  And I shall. In 2010, I promise I shall. Christmas is never a time of great joy for me.  It’s not a time of particular sadness, but given that the rest of the world seems determined to be elevated into a happier state of being for the latter half of December, my continued normal state of humdrum feels rather left behind in the rush for tinselly nirvana. Personally, 2009 has been an exhausting year.  Starting it in a new job, only to be made redundant from said job in the first week back in January.  Then starting work at Symbian ( www.symbian.org ) in March and working through until now without much of a break.  I need the rest.  I need a week of no work, no stress and no alarm clock. At least there has been some Christmas cheer this week.  Sunday was a parti...

I’ve never come across a situation in my life when it’s useful to say “be careful”. Mostly, people say it when you’re doing something potentially dangerous, in which case “being careful” is probably something you intend to do anyway.  And indeed, shouting “be careful” at someone walking a tightrope may cause them to turn around to look at you whilst working out what you shouted causing them to lose their balance and fall off said tightrope. I see this in the same category as saying “have a safe flight” to someone about to board a plane.  Unless you’re saying it to the pilot, the person you’re talking to is unlikely to have much control over the safety of the flight, so why say it at all. I guess it’s short hand for “I wish you a safe flight” and “be careful” is short hand for “I don’t want you to hurt yourself”. But this doesn’t inject any “point” into saying it.  Just because I know someone doesn’t want my plane to crash, I am not going to change my view of the f...