While hunting for a late Christmas present, I stumbled across the Tesco online store. One quick search for a Doctor Who boxset later, and that picture is the bizarre result I got back.

Given that Tesco is linking overtly to a legal store, can I assume that somewhere it has an illegal store, too? Can I have the link to that one, please?

The Tesco ‘legal’ Store

I haven’t done a security on a train piece for a moment, but I’m in the midst of a fascinating moment. Sat behind me is a Conservative MP – whose name is likely to be known to you – barking out all sorts of stuff into his mobile phone. He’s getting a bit stroppy with someone at the moment, so let me just take a minute to listen in…

…. ah, back now!

Given that this gentleman is happy to talk in a loud, snooty voice, it’s fair to say that, by my estimation, the entire carriage and a good deal of passengers in the next now knows his mobile number that he’s just given out, the name of the man at the Daily Express he’s trying to talk to, his movements for the next few days and what a rude sort of a man he is. He’s not so much talking down to people, as digging holes for them underground to sit in, so he can further establish his superiority. He seems to like scrawling on his piece of paper, though. A shrink would have a field day with it.

It’s a continual theme that the biggest compromise to any well thought-through security system is a human being rather than a machine. In this case, the only reason this particular Member of Parliament is likely to find at least two phone numbers compromised is because he’s made such a song and dance on the phone, and bleated them out at volume.

The moral of the story? Be careful what you talk about in public, and what you show people on a screen.

And don’t sit near me on a train.

Three times today I had to tell Adobe Acrobat Reader that I wasn’t interested in its updates. Three times!

What annoyed me most of all, though, was that in spite of the first dialog box talking about critical updates, the window that subsequently popped up with an upgrade I didn’t ask for had PhotoShop Album as one of these seemingly unmissable downloads. What exactly is supposed to be critical about that?

I’m getting fed up to the back teeth of companies using a process that’s supposedly just to keep our software secure and up to date as some form of Trojan horse mechanism to swing in some other product it’s trying to flog. Installation routines are getting just as bad. Would I like to install the Yahoo! toolbar one application asked me recently, in spite of the fact that it had no relevance whatsoever to the web app that Yahoo! is trying to punt out? Well no, I wouldn’t. And don’t ask me again either.

At least these days with the Microsoft updates, you tend to get what you need and not a lot else. Yet even it has had its days, using automatic updates to bombard Internet Explorer 7 through the gates, irrespective of whether those who trustingly allowed automated updates to be set actually wanted it or not.

I fully accept that updates, particularly set against the perils of the online world, are a necessary evil now. But I do find it frustrating at best, and a betrayal of the trust I grant these companies when updating programs on my PC at worst, when some other unnecessary and unwanted product is shoehorned along for the ride.

Walking round the shopping arcades of Britain – as I seem to have spent far too long doing over the past few days – I’ve been curious to see how retailers have dealt with Sony’s announcement of a cheaper version of the Playstation 3. Predictably, they’ve embraced it with open arms, to the point where Sony now boasts of a 178% increase in PS3 sales over the past weekend (although as someone wise probably said, 178% of little is still not very much).

But I can’t help feeling uncomfortable at a deception taking place here. Because the new £299 Playstation 3 price point has come at a cost to the consumer, of which many I’d argue know little about. For this isn’t the same machine that’s previously been sold for £425 that’s being discounted (and that’s why retailers are being very careful with their terminology). Instead, it’s a unit that’s got a 40GB hard drive instead of 60GB, has had all backwards compatibility with PS2 games taken away, has lost a memory slot and USB ports, and generally is a lower spec’d machine.

Joe Public, judging by the scenes I saw over the weekend, doesn’t seem to have realised this, nor is there a queue of shop assistants looking to put them right. They’re just glad to be shifting PS3s again in a quantity previously only seen in the first two weeks after launch.

It’s an uncomfortable sleight of hand that Sony has pulled here, even before you consider how it flies in the face of its previous statements one or two of its represenatives have made. And while it’ll likely give the Playstation 3 a better Christmas than it was previously facing, it’s a pity that the consumer is having to bear a bit of the brunt for such a mess being made of the PS3 project in the first place.

Most weeks, I end up staying in a London hotel. And most weeks, given that this is a fairly new, if suitably economical, residence, I have a problem with the electronic door key system. There’s nothing more heartwarming after a long day working to crash back at a hotel, only to come back down eleven floors to tell someone on receptionist that the door card isn’t working. If I’m lucky, sometimes I can detect a roll of the eyes, but most weeks I get away scott free.

Then the usual always happens when you ask for help with a piece of technology: along comes someone and fixes it within a second without explaining what they did. When I ask, I get told that you “insert the card like this”, which matches the exact same method that I’d used 20 or 30 times before going and asking for help in the first place.

And so, week in week out, the majority of times I would be stumped by this problem, and around one in every three weeks everything would work okay. Yet the rest of the time it didn’t. And every time it broke, someone would come and get it working straight away with the exact same explanation.

Now I have many faults, but I don’t think being permanently dim week after week is one of them. I at least like to implement my many low intelligence moments in shifts. It did all get me thinking about a small business who I provided technical support to for a couple of years in my younger days, where the frequent criticism I received was that I’d go in, fix something and not tell anyone what I’d done, meaning the same call would inevitably come up the following week. Maybe this is some form of belated comeback for that?

But even in technical support, I worked out soon enough that arming the end user with the necessary information more often went right than it went wrong (although, naturally, sometimes if went very, very wrong). And so I did start taking time to explain what had had happened, and how to fix things. End result? The number of calls went down, the computers were working that bit longer, and everyone was (seemingly) happy.

I bring this up because last night, someone at the hotel bothered to explain what was, in the end, a stupidly logical answer to my weekly adventure. Simply: there’s quite a long time delay between the computer writing a door card and the door itself being able to accept it. The weeks when my key had worked perfectly were those when the room had been in a more remote part of the hotel, and had thus taken me longer to get to. In short: all I had to do was wait about another minute.

It’s taken the hotel a good few months to relate this to me (and, in truth, I feel stupid for not working it out myself – I blame fatigue), and now, as a result, the days of eyeball rolling may well be over.

Ironically, it was the new and enthusiastic member of staff who told me this. The old hands, the ones most fed up with taking the trip up and down the stairs to fix the ‘broken’ key cards, had never even hinted this was the cause, only once revealing that “lots of guests have the same problem”.

At the very least, it made me feel a little less stupid. Just for a minute.

Just coming back off holiday, and have courageously started the process of Christmas shopping for my three year old. So off I popped to Amazon, to find appropriate age-related toys and got met with the following choice. It, er, seems that Amazon has removed three to four year olds from their target demographic…!

You get all sorts of technical knowledge in the strangest places. Standing in the queue at Greggs, deliberating between the array of doughnuts, pasties, and other contributors to my expanded waistline over the years, everyone in the shop overheard two teenage girls were engaged in heady debate just in front.

“T-Mobile is a rubbish network”, protested one. “Daz never got my texts when I was with them”.

“Vodafone are crap though, int they”, countered her young friend. “My bill last month was £180 with them. I’m thinking of changing”.

And here’s the thing: they’re both right. Much as you may shudder at the thought of the teenage Greggs-favouring, no doubt (if you read the Daily Mail) binge-drinking generation discussing mobile phone networks, and much though you may conclude that the technical background knowledge that leads them to their conclusions is a little shaky, they’re still absolutely right.

Because what’s hard to predict – for magazines reviewing technology, and for IT managers deploying it en masse – is how a human being will interface with it once it’s in their hands. Then, that long list of features is an irrelevance: it comes down to does it work, and does it do what I want to do when I want it to do it. And does is text Daz.

Of course, the teenage girls were no doubt equally enthralled by the discussion between two more senior ladies nearer the front of the queue, who were flummoxed by whether to have their bread sliced or not. Personally, I stuck to the cheese and onion pasty, and token can of Diet Coke.
Moral of the story? That entire IT departments should spend more lunchtimes in the bakers. Might be able to get it back on expenses, too…

I’ve just received a piece of market analysis that’s proclaiming that sales of digital photo frames are set to explode in the back end of 2007. How depressing is that?

Is it just me who finds these things a pitiful waste of technology? Or, more to the point, technology simply butting in where it isn’t welcome? For decade upon decade, to my knowledge, people seem to have had few problems with mounting a printed photo in a half decent frame and sticking it on their mantelpiece. It worked, it was simple, and everyone was happy.

Then technology stuck its oar in, and as a result, people the world over will be receiving these insipid gadgets as gifts this year. So we’re basically all expected to load our images onto a flash card, buy some good batteries (scrub that: lots of good batteries), and have a mini-Powerpoint presentation going on the fireplace now? Give me a break.

Apart from the environmental concerns here, of adding a power supply to something that ten years ago few would even considering needing one for, these things simply aren’t much cop are they? Once the novelty has gone and you deal with the reality of having a flashing screen on your fireplace, the temptation surely must be to relocate it a foot or two down.

But I’m curious. I appreciate lots of people have, and will receive, digital photo frames as gifts. Yet I’ve never been into the home of a single person who uses one day to day. Is it me, or is the digital photo frame the most unused, pointless gadget of the modern generation?

Hilariously, my train journey home last night, which was otherwise going perfectly to plan, was delayed one stop from home. It’s smashing when that happens, as there’s nothing like being a couple of steps from the end of the journey and having the rug ceremoniously pulled from underneath you.

The reason for the delay? Because some tit of a man, having not heeded the on-train announcement that we’d arrived at a station, took ages to get his stuff together and watched in horror as the automatic doors slung shut. You can imagine what went through his brain: what can I do? How can I get the doors back open? I can’t possibly do the logical thing and wait for the next station before battling a heavily computerised train with its automatic doors, can I?

Actually, I’m being kind. None of these thoughts seemingly flashed through his head. Instead, he pulled the emergency lever, which triggered the doors, and he was able to go and meet who he had to meet on time. Phew.

The rest of us in said train, of course, were then delayed fifteen minutes, entertained  by a carnival of alarms going on, beeps from the internal phone system, a raging train manager and a couple of announcements over the PA that effectively told us off for what the guy before had done.

All because, effectively, someone was given the opportunity to push a button. That, for me, is the biggest problem with the modern day technological world. Whether it’s your other half with the remote control or the emergency controls of a train, the problem with buttons is people are oh-so-tempted to press them. There seems to be a mindset in some people that it’s their eternal right to press them, whereas the more logical and kind thing to do would be to cut their fingers off and flush them down the toilet.

The train, naturally, then got caught up in extra traffic that added a further five or ten minutes to the journey. And the after-effects in this case of one person activating controls they shouldn’t was a grumbling train manager, and a whole lot of people who had to wait, because one person couldn’t.

Not that I’m angry about it, of course. It’s just a good job I don’t watch Corrie…

So this is when the console battle finally starts to get interesting.

In spite of the swathes of hype over the Wii and the Xbox 360, the new generation console war isn’t really - Nintendo aside - in the mass market space yet, with pricing still reflecting the premium status of the machines.

But that may be about to change. Sony’s confirmation of a $100 price cut on the Playstation 3 in the States sets off phase two of the battle, and we’re at the point where the real numbers start to come through. It’s a price cut that Sony both couldn’t afford and couldn’t afford not to make, but at least it means this Christmas - even with a 360 price cut expected - will be a better indicator of where the chips will eventually lie come the end of each machine’s lifespan. 100 million PS2 made it out over the course of its (ongoing) lifespan, and thus far the 5-10m sales of individual machines at the moment have to be taken as opening skirmishes, and little more.

The likelhood is though that the PS3 is still two price cuts away from being mass market, not one, and as a result Sony are continuing to surrender a valuable commodity in this particular battle - time. Will $100 be enough to stem the tide? Probably not. And it’ll be interesting to see what they do in the UK, what with at least one High Street store still brazenly selling the PS3 for under £400 anyway.

The one to watch is, still, the Wii. More and more pundits are creeping out of the woodwork and suggesting that now is as good as it gets for Nintendo’s baby. But, surely, only a fool would bet against it having one hell of a Christmas…