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So about six weeks ago the company I work for was bought by DoubleClick, probably the largest technology company in our particular niche industry (digital advertising and marketing). On Friday, it was announced that Google has agreed to buy DoubleClick (article chosen because it is a reasonably good non-corporate background for anyone who has no idea what I’m talking about but is interested).

I’m not actually concerned in the slightest. I have no idea what it all means, but I’ve spent seven years in an industry where the entire focus of a technology company can change in under a month, so I’m used to that. I just hope it stops now, so I don’t have to keep on re-adjusting my list of things to think about. (No one is likely to buy Google, so I’m pretty safe there.)

Anyway, I’m off to enjoy the sun for a bit. Shower some pity on James, who has spent most of this weekend inside, running auditions for Tony Blair the Musical.

Dear bus drivers,

When you overtake a cyclist only to swerve into a bus stop just a few metres ahead, it’s a little bit like if you were walking along a pavement and a fat person jogged past you then stood in your way. Except that if you walked into the fat person it wouldn’t take your teeth out.

Kindly stop it you morons.

Best regards,

James Lark

Just to let you know that the latest film from Talk to Rex is now finished and up on the internet. Yes, we did finish it a lot quicker than our last one…

Go and have a butcher’s here.

You may not have noticed my quiescence, because frankly James’ is much more of a shock. I’m amazed he’s been able to hold it in this long; entire weeks have passed with no post from him at all. Incredible.

However I have also been quiet, and probably will continue to be so for a while. I’m currently in New York, sitting in someone else’s office (where the lights are on a motion sensor, so every so often they turn off, leaving me in darkness until I flap my arms around). This is “head office”, the nerve centre of DoubleClick, my current employers. In some ways it’s much like the London office I’m based in (which was until recently a separate company); the people are passionate, generally have a good sense of humour, all good stuff – but there are a few key differences…

• many more people, to a quiet terrifying extent; I could probably walk the corridors here for a week and still not have passed everyone (possibly because they’d be sat down working, not walking the corridors)
• everyone seems to be married; probably a surprise only because Tangozebra has a disproportionate number of people who aren’t (draw your own conclusions)
• lots more whiteboards – as someone who loves whiteboards, and has been campaigning internally to get lots more, I’m really encouraged to see them around, not quite flocking, but at least in enough numbers that once the humans go home they can be gregarious, the way whiteboards should be

Damn, the light’s gone out again. Off to flap.

Alastair Bennett and James Lark, presenters of the podcast 2 Victoria Street at Home, would like to issue an apology for their podcast of 1 April 2007 in which they claimed that their housemate, Chris Law, had died in a horrific yoga accident.

They had hoped that their references to Unitarians, washing up and Ambassador Property Management, as well as the fact that they had to stop every few minutes because they were laughing, would make it sufficiently clear that the podcast was an April Fool’s joke. They acknowledge, however, that their work was sufficiently convincing to cause distress to some listeners, in one instance on the morning of an extremely important exam.

Very sorry about that last bit especially.

They accept that the whole thing was, by all reasonable standards, inconceivably tasteless. Although that is what some listeners have come to expect from this particular podcast, they feel on this occasion that they betrayed the trust of their listeners.

In some respects, not unlike Orson Welles.

Chris Law himself was unaware of this broadcast and he wishes to make it clear that he has given his housemates a stern telling off. He also wishes make it clear that he is not dead – in fact, having just returned from a week of yoga, he has never felt so alive.

Alastair and James apologise for all distress caused by any of the above and promise to try to behave themselves in future. The podcast has been removed. In the tradition of Ofcom complaints, however, they have reissued said podcast preceded by this apology, in the hope of using their error to boost listener ratings.

Listen again.

You may have noticed I’ve been uncharacteristically quiet on the self-promotion front for several months. The reason is that I’ve been working on an ambitious theatrical project which half of me thought would never see the light of day, and half of me thought would be done by somebody else first.

Nevertheless, it would appear that we’ve got a (very nice) venue, and to date nobody else has announced their intention to do the same – frankly quite obvious – idea. Though there have been rumblings about the possibility of such a thing happening, and following the tuk-tuk incident I’ve decided it’s time to make this idea public before somebody else claims they had it first.

Here it is then. It’s Tony Blair – the Musical. Somebody was bound to do it sooner or later, so I’ve taken it upon myself. Hope that’s okay.

The extremely pretty website has more information, including details of how you can support the production by buying a peerage. I’ve also just been interviewed about it on the Friday Cities website if you’re after more juicy details.

And more juicy details will be forthcoming here as and when I feel like plugging my show some more.

When we went to Bankok with Girton College Choir way back in 2001, Alastair and I were so thrilled by our experiences with the milk float/rickshaw crossbreed they call the “tuk-tuk” that we decided there and then that one day we would make a Michael Palin-style geographical odyssey called Bankok to Girton in a Tuk-Tuk.

You can imagine the kind of thing it would involve; the first episode would see us in Bankok, trying to persuade a tuk-tuk driver to part with his vehicle. Off we’d set up through Thailand, where my geography deserts me but I think it would involve India and there would of course be a hilarious episode where we broke down and had to take parts from a Bajaj auto rickshaw to make our tuk-tuk work again. Hopefully we’d also come across a tiny village where they’d think we were gods and decorate us with flowers. Finally we’d arrive back at our old college in a battered old hybrid tuk-tuk, dirty, hungry, desperately in need of sleep and just in time for evensong.

All naturally accompanied by the lively banter that I am led to believe at least three people are enjoying on a weekly basis here.

We couldn’t see why any television director would possibly refuse such an idea, except that they would probably say “why don’t we get Michael Palin to do it?” so we were waiting either for one of us to get famous or for Michael Palin to die.

This morning I was giving the Friday Project website a cursory browse and happened to notice this.

Yup. Some television producer has teamed up with a medical student and done our idea. Only they’ve made it less Palin and more Priscilla, Queen of the Desert by painting the tuk-tuk pink. (Though I think I might even have made that suggestion to Alastair in one of my drunker moments.)

This morning at 2 Victoria Street a tiny dream has died.

Leading (technology) blogger Kathy Sierra has received death threats and sexual and violent intimidation both in comments on her own blog and elsewhere. As a result she’s pulled out of a speaking/training engagement – I can only hope that the people responsible are found, and that she can in time regain some normalcy in her life.

My reaction to this is horror, but as I think about it, death threats, intimidation and inciting people to take matters into their own hands – despite the law – is what the UK tabloid press does best. It’s awful that the blogging world has got to this point… awful, but perhaps not surprising.

I think people too often forget that the reason these things happen is that we are all people, and some people (quite a lot, as it happens) don’t really respect everyone else. (Indeed, it’s doubtful anyone ever respects everyone else.) That this hasn’t happened in high profile blogging circles before certainly doesn’t mean it hasn’t happened in blogs (there’s a lot that hides in the long tail); it has, after all, happened in one way or another throughout all of human history. We are mean people, and we do mean things.

Tim Bray, most often a fount of sanity and reasoned thought, calls for more information to be dug up, which while valuable still seems to fall into the trap of believing that blogging is its own society, and that we can police it internally. We cannot. Increasingly bloggers aren’t even a separate community; blogging has become too broad, too common, too intertwined with too many people’s lives – it is just another tool in the wider world. Saying that something is badly out of control and needs to be fixed, urgently, as Bray does, suggests that this is something internal to the blogging community, which it absolutely is not. The demons came in with us, and they won’t leave until we leave: tackling them inside the small room of the web will at most damage the furniture.

If we want this to stop happening, it has to be tackled out in society, in the real world. I’m not convinced that this is even possible, although of course that doesn’t mean we should not try as hard as possible.

(Anyone find any women-at-risk charities in the United States? Google fails me…)

James Aylett was waxing lyrical down the phone to me yesterday about the qualities of his new Apple Mac, and I suggested he should maybe write to Rob Webb about it, since it seems he is now the human vessel for the Mac collective.

I suddenly thought about those messages I get on my PC saying “application has unexpectedly had to close, click here to send error report” (which happens about five times an hour, so I’d question the accuracy of their use of the word “unexpectedly”), and what I thought was, wouldn’t it be great if the error reports were sent directly to David Mitchell’s email account? If nothing else it would probably explain the lack of any kind of response.

The above picture always brings to mind one of the first times I met David Mitchell, because I recall he had injured his foot for real that time and was walking with a pronounced limp and possibly a stick as well. I don’t remember exactly what he’d done, except that it was something funny like shutting it in a door or falling down some stairs. I wonder if his future casting as a PC was pretty much inevitable from that moment onwards…

…but the evilometer doesn’t lie.

How evil are you?