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 ...