“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?)

“Those who have not yet heard about Second Life, the online virtual world, can’t have read a newspaper for the past six months. Since May, when Business Week splashed the story of Anshe Chung, an in-world entrepreneur who dominates Second Life’s virtual real-estate market, all branches of the UK media have featured specials outlining the machinations of this playground of the imagination. Now Reuters has set up its own Second Life bureau, promising to break stories from the virtual frontiers.

“The media orgy was predictable. Here is a world that exists only on a rack of web servers in California. Yet more than half a million people (a population that’s growing furiously) log on for more than a week per month, on average. Could anything do more to confirm our fears of technology disconnecting us from reality?”

Read the rest here. One small note: it appears the subs at the New Statesman make no distinction between a “working week” (35-40 hours) and a “working week” (168 hours), rendering a reference in the article wildly inaccurate. The rest of us get to go home after dark, but poor sods, John Kampfner must have his subs on the “stay awake” pills, turning round copy through the night in anticipation of the launch of their new website. For reference, then, the Wired travel guide to Second Life has excellent figures.