Following a random night out at the Scala to attend White Mischief, a group of us went to an unusual variety show hosted by Miss Behave last Friday. The Camden roundhouse theatre was a great venue (though the service at the bar and elsewhere was typically awful – I’ll complain at some other point at length about how these partly charity based venues always seem to miss the point on service). The acts were varied and I had a great time.
The highlight was a pair of songs and some amusing commentary by Frank Sanazi – Frank Sanatra songs covered by Adolf Hitler. Hilarious as long as you were prepared to leave your politically correct radar tuned down. If you get a chance to see him, make sure you do.

Yet another twist in th unreality that it quantum physics, in this article we get the first hint that the collapse of the quantum state – is not absolute. Researchers confirmed a hypothesis that you could sort of measure the state of a particle and then stuff it back into the quantum state.
I wonder what this would imply for quantum cryptography. The theory relies upon the fact that you can’t measure the state of a particle without signaling that fact – you can tap the line but people are guaranteed to know. If the measurement distinction is not so black and white, does this theory still hold?

BT is building a rather well known network to replace it’s existing one – it’s all bundled under the name 21CN (for 21st Century Network).
One of the lesser known aspects of this is the API into the network functions. I started playing with this on Saturday and was surprised by a number of things:
1) It’s really easy to get started and use
2) It seems to do a lot less than I might have expected
3) What it does do is really quite useful

It took about 2 hours from first registering to getting my first little mini application interfacing with the system – pretty neat and you can test some sensible stuff for free – sending SMSs and making calls though there are some pretty obvious restrictions (you can’t call premium rate numbers for example).

That said, there’s only about 6 things you can do with the much vaunted plaform:

• Send SMS messages
• Receive SMS messages and react in some way
• Set up a call between 2 3rd parties
• Set up an manage a conference call
• Set up a IVR call flow application
• Set up a database of users with attributes

That’s it – however in all that there’s enough to do all the basics of a adding telephony integration to your business. I’m sure there are cheaper ways to do any one of these, but it’s certainly a nice integrated service.

This is great news for me at least. I’ve really only ever bought books from 2 places on-line. Now those places are one. If this integrates with Amazon Prime I’m officially never leaving the house again!

Seth Godin always finds a way to challenge me. Every post is annoying because he asks why you’re not doing something obvious you never thought of.
The latest wheeze is TriIibes – a sort of melting pot of his readers but by invitation only. It’s easy to get one, just pre-order his new book and it would be simple to dismiss as a stunt but it’s first week Seth is obviously watching. If it’s a stunt it’s a lot of work to sell maybe an extra two thousand books.