Observations from a Hill

OK, following from last night's teaser, I said I'd riff on the success or failure of good ideas, and that one of the great ideas that didn't make the grade was the Apple Newton: the MessagePad, from the early-mid 1990s. I have to say I loved the device, despite its obvious shortcomings, and even foresaw using it as an integrated part of a suite of show-control programming gear for theatre presentations, turnkey visitor installations, museum displays, and so on. Unfortunately the device's tenure on this earth was short-lived and for one good reason: handwriting recognition, or rather its piss-poor performance in that department. It was a great idea pulled up short by the immature hardware available. Apple tried to run with this one before it could walk. Three years later, we were producing a piece of software that sought the opposite goal: to straighten out the shortcomings of contemporary hardware and make it do what no-one else had thought to do properly. We took a sim...

The nicety [there's that word again] that determines the success or failure of a truly great idea is timing. Timing either of technical or market readiness; get either wrong, and no matter how truly groundbreaking your concept is, it will drown at birth and you will live to ruefully see it resurface as someone else's cash cow product. I know from personal experience, as I've mentioned before in these pages. Get the timing wrong and you will fail, no matter how good your idea or product. This diversion was prompted by a small piece on Medium about the Apple Newton [which I loved at the time of its introduction], which failed on both counts; however I'm too knackered to carry the thought much further, so I'll come back to that train of thought when I've had a good night's sleep. I'll leave you with the above picture: the sunset from Fairview Heights this evening. It really was as spectacular as it looks in the image. It serves to highlight that 'succes...

I chanced upon an old acquaintance from the Golden Era of Bethesda's bohemian period in the 1980s, this afternoon. He didn't remember my name, which is quite fine by me: much water has passed under the bridge and much grey hair grown - and lost - in the interim, and ego and self-importance are concepts best avoided. He is a Quaker. I have Quakers in my family tree. I would like to learn more about them, and how that line turned to more mainstream religion and why. As I age, this lost knowledge has taken on a greater importance for me. I started the family genealogy journey focussing on the line that my dad had begun in the 1980s and 90s: his mother's, and her connections with North Wales, Staffordshire and Australia. Since my first, tentative overtures I have dug deep into both sides of my immediate family's history and turned up some pretty interesting stuff across the piece. One strand of interest to me was the sudden [to me] appearance of Quakerism on the Southall si...

Following on from last night's post, I was musing over exactly what nationalised land could look like in practice, assuming a blank canvas with no Taliban-esque dissolution-of-the-monasteries style of wanton destruction or restitutional compensation to either fork out or ignore altogether. These questions remain unasked for the simple fact that land is still, simply, owned. How does a government address this simple conundrum: who gets to build and live/do business where and by whose say-so? The tacit understanding with regards to land ownership - despite historical facts to the absolute contrary - is that certain individuals, families and institutions have historical rights to such ownership: in the UK that starts with the Church and the Monarchy, who over the centuries, through force both physical and spiritual, imposed a web of private land ownership by deed of gift for favours rendered; a concept familiar in more modern times as racketeering and protection, cf the Cosa Nostra, C...

How long do we have to wait - it's now generation on generation already: over seventy-five years since that triumphant Labour win, post-war - before someone grasps the nettle of land-ownership? So many of our current problems in trying to unpick the Gordian economic knot left behind in these dying years of the most destructive economic experiment ever conducted: neo-liberalism; could have been assuaged for all time had the then new Labour government added the nationalisation of land to the social contract. They had the opportunity and the clout to have made it happen. They had a very brief window of opportunity and they blued it, and the land-owning gentry blew a sigh of relief in turn. Land. Our land. Tir ni, in Welsh; Wales and the earliest inhabitants of these lands - Y Brython, who lost almost everything to the various conquering hordes from across the channel - representing perhaps the very earliest examples of land theft from the commons by self-appointed gentry of whatever s...

I was watching the last knockings of a documentary from 2010 on some TV channel this afternoon about the making of the album that brought Black Sabbath their big break, taking the US by storm in 1970: 'Paranoid'. It was their second studio album, and the title single from it - apparently a make-weight throwaway to fill space on the record - went straight to the top of the singles charts at the same time that the album did likewise in the album charts. By chance, this evening I was watching one of my favourite YouTube channels, 'No Cover Charge', where the boys were over from Nashville visiting  the Marshall Amplification museum in Milton Keynes, and trying out some very famous, revered and loud Marshall guitar amps. The confluence of these two disparate media streams took me back to April 1970, when the fifteen-year-old me and a bunch of mates attended one of the first concerts by Black Sabbath in a major-ish venue. We had only just discovered the eponymous debut album...