throwing dice along the wharf

The New Year has more or less resumed its normal rotation this week, with work restarted, traffic jams re-instigated in the usual places, TV schedules back to normal and an early start to the 2015 UK election featuring in every single news broadcast.

Like summer holiday adverts which start on Boxing Day, there's probably been a popular agreement that broadcasters get their spinometers out at the first hint of a new year speech.

The old colour coding won't hack it for the next time around, that's for sure.

Nowadays, there'll probably be talk of big data and deep dive analytics.

It'll be interesting to see how the pundits dance along the coloured wind without dangling from a rope of sand.

Meantime, here's an aerial view of Nathalie Miebach's transformation of some big data.

Weave away, boys, weave away.

i smoke my friends down to the filter

Sometimes you have to pick a corner so when the bar fills you can still spot the friendly faces. The smile that might not be complete recognition but you know its the right person. The one that tells you the dreams are still alive and they don't all belong to someone else.

So yesterday, we'd picked to meet in a barroom I'd never visited and I arrived so early that the barman was kneeling, lighting log fires in the hearths.

I'd already checked my overcoat pockets for burned out ferris wheel lights or other tell-tale signs of recent misdemeanours. My hands came out clean and ready to wave in the candle-light.

We were both forward lookers so after only a glance or two over our shoulders we moved it right along - fun going forward. Of course there were secrets but none that the wine won't protect or another day can't provide for a slow reveal.


Picture : Anders Petersen - Cafe Lehmitz - 1960

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I was wondering whether I was imagining that the advert breaks on some of the satellite channels seemed to be getting longer.

Not quite at the level of American channels where there can be an ad break in the title sequence at each end of a show, but certainly that there were now sometimes around a dozen adverts in the breaks throughout a programme.

I'd probably missed that the satellite channels can already run 12 minutes of adverts per hour whereas traditional broadcasters have had to make do with around half of this. It turns out that its all to be changed as an experiment and that additionally there can be product placement in certain shows.

It could also explain a strange little sequence I saw in the new Hawaii Five - Oh series, where at the end of the first episode one of the cops gave his buddy a hotel voucher. I thought it was slightly wooden moment, until a few moments later the credits rolled including a 'sponsored by' sequence featuring a well known hotel chain.

I'm not sure about all of this.