Not the Obama parody you're looking for. Still my favourite though.

The four tone image of Obama looking like a modern day Che Guevera was a brilliant graphic device upon which to hang his presidential campaign. It was post modern and eye catching, and critically didn’t use the communist red and black so it stood out from all the other Che-pastiches that have cropped up over the years so it felt fresh and new.

There is nothing clever is pastiching the pastiche. Maybe once or twice, a couple of years ago. But I don’t understand how it finds its way into pretty much every story now. I’m so tired of it I won’t even link to the prominent political blog that’s using the Obama’d face of Andy Coulson as a graphic today.

Andy Coulson. Ex-News of the World ed, Conservative spinner-in-chief, back under scrutiny for allegedly authorising journalists to listen in to celebrities’ voice mail. Obviously a political diarist looking to defend Coulson’s reputation is going to comically reference the election of the first black president of the United States. The parallels are immediately clear.

Aren’t they?

I presume this is related to the fact that the same class was cancelled during the summer school because the speaker, Sally Gainsbury of the Health Service Journal and Nursing Times, was off ill. Whatever the reason, it’s an enormously generous gesture and one which I’d urge anyone with a bit of free time to take up. Especially if, like me, you’ve recently been staring at hundreds of spreadsheets of local government finance data and felt a little out of your depth.

Tickets are free, but there’s limited numbers. Sign up at the cij spreadsheet here.

There are two things I’d do to improve it.

The first is nested notebooks. My tree directory is getting a bit stupidly long now, because the only realistic way to keep things organised is to have a notebook for every story you’re writing. It’d be nice to have a notebook for Stuff, for example, broken up into sub-books for laptop reviews, GPS reviews etc. Or an International Development book broken up by country.

You could probably do this with tags, but I’m hopeless at tagging photos or notes properly. My brain hasn’t evolved properly into the new era of fluid data sorting, and needs some sort of library hierarchy to fall back on.

The other thing I’d do is introduce a decent To-Do list, so I don’t have notes spread across Evernote and Remember the Milk, but can keep everything in one place.

The first improvement I can be patient about. Second I’m hoping will be sorted by Egretlist, which I’m busy installing now.

Egretlist: Attractive, but not the most intuitively designed app ever.

You need an Australian PayPal account to legitimately download the album.

I almost never write about music for the simple reason that I’m so far out of touch these days I couldn’t actually name more than five or six chart songs from the last two years.

Megan Washington‘s debut album, I Believe You Liar, isn’t terribly easy to get hold of even in this day and age of digital downloads, but is available to stream from her site. It’s a truly beautiful album – serious, lyrical, simple and beguiling.

Her best known song is Clementine. This is the official video, although I think this short film, Bathtub IV, which uses it to showcase tilt shift photography is marginally better. Very marginally.

Who's a pretty boy then?

Tomorrow is Tabby’s first day at school. A 14-year-sentence with no chance of reprieve and in which you get extra time for good behaviour. To make up for this crual and unusual punishment, I let her experience her last taste of freedom at the zoo. Felt a bit sorry for the flamingos, but generally the animals seemedvery well cared for. Especially the owls. Only 5000 breeding pairs of barn owls left in the UK apparently. Took lots of photos, as usual only had chance to process a few and get them on Flickr so far…

Tiny, I tell ya

Look ma, no hands

Finally getting round to processing some photo sets and putting them onto Flickr. Starting with this trip to the circus a few weeks ago. Tabby loved it.

Edit – slightly fixed now

Then again, I might wait for the 10inch version.

As happy as I’ve been with my iPhone 3GS, I’ll never buy an iPad or another iPhone. It’s the obvious reasons, really – the inability of iOS to support decent multitasking, the walled garden of the App Store, the lack of Flash support, the general attitude of Apple in the wake of antennagate…

Don’t get me wrong, the iPhone is an extraordinary device which changed everything just by taking what people had been struggling with over the last few years and doing it right, but it’s time to move on. Waving goodbye to all the cash I’ve spent on apps which will be useless if I don’t stick with Apple is just something I’ll have to live with.

Which is why I can’t wait for the iPad competition to come out. I’m also still in love with my Asus Eee 901, but the netbook is such an inelegant and slow way of doing the things I want a tablet for that more often than not if I want to check Twitter or cross reference something I’ve just seen on TV, for example, I’ll end up using my phone instead.

Two pieces of news have got me excited this week, then. The first is that Viewsonic is unveiling it’s 7inch tablet contender (above), based on Android, at IFA 2010. It’s called the ViewPad 7 and has all the usual 3G, GPS and Bluetooth gubbins, but importantly has the USB port that the iPad lacks. If only it had an HDMI out too.

The second is that Canonical are coding multitouch support into future versions of Ubuntu. As promising as Android is as a platform for tablets, I’m not so sure I want Google to rule the web any more than I trust Apple with that role.