all talk and no action

I'm now out of the office and away from the internet for the next few days. Have a brilliant Christmas and new year, everyone.

Here's a seasonal joke:

What do you call a group of chess fanatics bragging about their games in a hotel lobby?

Chess nuts boasting in an open foyer.

Haha :)

Judge Jules wrote the theme tune for the Richard & Judy show.

Aah, the season of goodwill. Carol singers trash an elderly couple's garden while on the other side of the world, drunken Santas go on the rampage, robbing stores and assaulting security guards.

Of course, in the old days things were very different. This is what Christmas in America looked like in the 1800s:

A rowdy drunken street carnival, a raucous combination of Halloween, New Year's Eve, and Mardi Gras. The poor would demand entrance into the homes of the rich and aggressively beg for food, drink, and money. Sometimes things would escalate and there would be break-ins, vandalism, sexual assault, and plenty of drinking. In 1828, a particularly violent Christmas riot in New York led the city to institute its first professional police force.

This is something I've been meaning to mention for a while. Over at BuzzMachine, Jeff Jarvis writes about a meeting he had with The Guardian newspaper's management.

The night before the meeting, The Guardian's Editor Alan Rusbridger made a comment to Jarvis about the new presses they'd just spent millions of pounds on to convert the paper into its new Berliner format:

"They may be the last presses we ever own."

Now, I have no idea how long printing presses last, but BuzzMachine says they're good for "a few decades". That's easily enough time for e-paper to be widely, and cheaply, available.

The Guardian has also launched a downloadable RSS reader, which comes pre-populated with RSS feeds from its own site along with the ability to add feeds from elsewhere. This seems like a sensible move: if your readers are getting stories from all over the web, why not help them facilitate this, and try to push some of your own content -- and ads -- their way at the same time? It's also a handy way of keeping your logo on their desktop.

Nissan has developed a paint that can repair itself. According to the press release, Scratch Guard Coat contains an elastic resin that helps prevent scratches from affecting the inner layers of a car's painted surface. When scratched, the paint returns to its original state in between a day and a week, depending on temperature and the depth of the scratch.

Nissan says it will first use the paint on an SUV "that is scheduled for a partial makeover in the near future". The paint will be applied to areas such as the chassis, bumpers and door mirrors.

What is it with rhyming press releases? First the Sexy Pixel Homepage uses a poem to explain its existence, and this morning I received a press release warning of the dangers of MP3 players:

Christmas is coming,
The Goose is getting fat,
And workers are expecting,
MP3 and video players in their hat,
Security should worry,
When devices get plugged in,
For the mobile security nightmare,
Is that hackers get to win.

Keats it ain't.