machine-envy

openDemocracy will shortly be publishing my interview with Andrew Gowers. In the meantime, the New Statesman have put up my latest column - what to buy a geek for Christmas. Of course, if you’re a real geek, you will have ordered all your presents online by now, so treat it as a little light relief:

“I had a strange dream last night. In a living room that bears no resemblance to my own, but in which I was entertaining friends, one of my guests found a box marked simply “Wii”. “What’s this?” he asked accusingly. It could only be one thing. As we pulled out swaths of bubble-wrap, looks of betrayal appeared on the faces around me. Sure enough, it was Nintendo’s seventh-generation games console, complete with innovative motion-sensitive wireless controller. What was I doing with this, when the product won’t hit the UK market until 8 December? More importantly, why was it still in the box?

“It was a classic anxiety dream…”

Read the rest here.

If you’re wondering what I want for Christmas, I found out yesterday afternoon. Halfway through the 15 minutes I’d managed to bag with Andrew Gowers at the Treasury, my archaic analogue dictaphone started chewing up the tape. Luckily no part of the interview was destroyed, it just meant I had to blush and change the tape halfway through recording.

I love my dictaphone because unlike a lot of digital recorders, it has one button which says play and one button which says record. Simple. But it’s unreliable, gives poor quality recordings and is, well, analogue. What I really want is a very, very simple and usable digital voice recorder with 100% reliability and not too much stupid software for getting it onto my computer in mp3/ogg format. Anybody have any recommendations?

Oh, and I also want a Nabaztag. (Isn’t he cute? Perhaps I could use him to record interviews… Do you think he’d go down well at the Treasury?)