Who? What? Why? Where? When? and How?
Holidays, clashing shows, ties and customs
This month Steve Rogerson has some issues at customs and gets frustrated over some rather major diary clashes in 2016!
S
ummer, and as usual more than the average number of e-mails come back with some variation of out of
office or on holiday replies. Most of these are quite dull but functional. However, I have to raise my hat to Wally Harrison of Network Rail. His out of office reply came back with the line, “I will be checking e- mails on an occasional basis dependent upon the position of the sun and the nearest glass of sangria.” I didn’t have my annual holiday at Embedded World in Nuremberg this year - for the first time in many a year. Neither did I go to Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, something I have occasionally done in the past. But I could have gone to both, as these days they were held on different weeks rather than the stupidity of some past years when they were held at the same time. However, any hopes that such nonsense was in the past were
quickly dispelled when I looked at the dates for next year. Yes, they have done it again and the two shows clash. Now, I don’t know whose fault it is. I
don’t know who put their dates down first and the other followed. Nor do I really care. I just want this idiocy to end. There has always been an overlap between the two shows, both among exhibitors and visitors - after all, it is embedded technology that powers the mobile world. This is even more so these days with all the brouhaha over the Internet of Things. So please guys, sit down, talk to each other and make sure that 2016 is the last year this happens.
I think the fates were lying in wait for me after my recent column about the wearing, or not wearing, of ties. I did threaten to break the habit of a lifetime by not wearing a tie while wearing a suit. That decision though was taken out of my
hands at the recent Mentor Automotive Forum when I actually forgot to pack one. And given this was held on the campus of the University of Warwick in Coventry, there was nowhere really handy to buy one. So, I went tieless with a suit. And I am happy to say I survived the experience. Unless forced to, I try to ditch the suit for airline travelling, purely for comfort reasons. This was a problem when I was younger, as my long hair and black leather jacket seemed to make me a magnet for customs inspectors whenever I re-entered the UK. However, the older me, still with long hair but in a ponytail, and still wearing black, started to become ignored. I was obviously too old to be doing anything illegal, or so I thought. Coming in from Europe on the Eurostar in early July I was stopped by customs for the first time in years. I mean, why? What on earth could I possible be smuggling from Belgium? Has anyone made a prediction about how many billion times we are going to be told that someone has predicted there will be so many billion connected devices by 2020, or whatever year they have picked? Look, we know the Internet of Things is growing, so stop guessing how many
connected devices there will be. It is going to be big. We get it, OK? Talking of which, I was interested to see Cisco combining various IoT products and services into one product, which it called IoT System. OK, that is fairly unimaginative but could this mean that Cisco has at last joined the rest of the world in calling it ‘Internet of Things’ rather than trying to pretend it was called ‘Internet of Everything’, just because it invented that term? As to the internet itself, I was rather
interested in a survey published by the British Library in which it produced a Magna Carta for the digital age, listing the top ten clauses that people voted on from over 500 posted online. Unsurprisingly, the most popular were versions of stopping companies paying to control the information we see on the web and an end to governments censoring what we see. In these days of mass commercialisation of the web and increasing government interference, I suspect none of us will live to see either of those coming true.
Ah well, maybe we can console ourselves by joining Wally Harrison on the beach with a glass of sangria. Cheers!
This may look like one of the video games that used to be regularly seen in pubs - the ones that let people play and have somewhere to put their drinks at the same time. Well the technology has improved a bit since I battled space invaders while supping a real ale, as this version from Videofonika uses the latest capacitive touch screen from Zytronic. And its range of applications has increased as well, with many imaginative uses. However, the imagination seemed to disappear when the company decided to name the product - it is called @Table, Groan! The release also doesn’t say whether you can still play games on it.
42 July/August 2015 Components in Electronics
This shows the celebrations during the official opening of Mouser’s new customer service centre in Tokyo. I am not quite sure what they are doing in the picture, but it looks a lot more fun than most of the official openings I have attended.
www.cieonline.co.uk
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