I’ve read a number of articles over the last few years talking about the wondrous ways in which QR Codes are going to revolutionise our lives. Japan is usually held up as an example of this, and for good reason. It was on one of my fairly regular trips to Japan a few years back that I ended up asking one of the guys from the local office what those funny, black and white blocky things were I was seeing on pretty much everything.

Japan certainly has some cool examples. Apart from just about every ad on the train having a QR Code on it which you can scan using your phone and get directed to a website with more info about the product, It’s reached into dozens of other areas:

• The box your burger comes in when you visit McDonald’s in Japan has a QR Code on it. Scan it on your phone and you’ll be directed to a website that contains nutritional information about the thing you’re about to eat, much more detailed info than you could reasonably print on the box. The fact that you get to read this after your purchase, not before, is beside the point 🙂
• You have the option of having the boarding pass for your JAL flight sent as a QR Code to your phone. You can then display it on your phone screen and scan it to board the flight. I like this one a lot, partly because it reverses the normal “scan a code using your phone to read some data” idea, and instead has the code on your phone being scanned.

There are a bunch more, but my question is, why haven’t these taken off in a big way elsewhere? My last few phones have had QR Code scanners installed on them by default, and with every man and his dog now having an iPhone, isn’t the time ripe for this?

Now, I understand the JAL example above probably took some reasonable investment to setup, but QR codes could be used in much less ambitious ways.

For example, go to http://mobilecodes.nokia.com and you can generate a QR code containing a URL, your contact details, or really any other small amount of data you want to be able to be scanned. Do this with either your contact details, or a link to your VCard, and put the resulting image on your physical business card, and then rather than typing your contact details into their Address Book, someone can simply scan your code on their phone and have it all downloaded.

What else? Well, even without going to the lengths that JAL have, why couldn’t the itinerary I have to print out each time I travel overseas have QR codes next to each flight so I can scan them and get directed to a site giving updates on the flight departure time? Tripit, are you listening?

I saw this article the other day about Book Crossing. Add a QR code to the sticker that gets stuck to the book and updating the history for a book is as simple as scanning it and entering some details. Similar story with SendMeHome.

None of these are revolutionary, nor do they require a big investment. However, they definitely would add some value to the process.

What prompted all of this? Well, I’ve been waiting for QR Codes to “arrive” for awhile, but today I tried to download, from my PC, a new version of a piece of software I use on my phone. I had to fill out some details, then I was directed to a download page. Unfortunately, if I wanted to then download it directly to my phone, rather than download to my PC and sync it, I had to manually type a convoluted URL into my phone. C’mon guys, you write software for a bloody phone, why not just give me a QR code I can scan?

Interesting article here about reviving old brands, the disconnect between reality and what people remember as reality, and the opportunity that exists in redefining the entire product under a revived brand.

Most of the examples they give are on products where the reasons for buying are less technical. ie. clothes, coffee, etc. Even the New Beetle example they gave comes into this category, I’m sure many people bought that not for it’s performance as transport, but for emotional reasons.

I’m left wondering what the opportunity in software is, and whether nostalgia and high-tech really go together. Would a retro name on a new product, even assuming it shared some of the strengths that made the old product popular, provide the same value as it seems to here?

A few weeks back I went to see the Jesus and Mary Chain at the Enmore Theatre. To be honest, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Pretty much every album from these guys had a markedly different sound, from their earlier, heavily distorted and feedback drenched efforts to the later, cleaner releases (well, clean for the Mary Chain). Which would we get tonight?

Photo by pj_in_oz, used under the Creative Commons license

Well, mostly we got the cleaner version, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing, as live it certainly let the melodies come through. About the only time they started to dirty things up was during Reverence, and to be honest it’s not a bad choice of tracks to let loose on. Still, after seeing Sonic Youth at the same venue so recently, this gig did feel ever so slightly light, and I never thought that’s how I’d feel after a Mary Chain show.
Even the obligatory spat between the Reid brothers was over before it really began. Maybe they’ve just mellowed with age.

Photo by pj_in_oz, used under the Creative Commons license

Re-reading this, it sounds negative, and I don’t really mean it to. I had a great time, I guess I’d just built these guys up in my mind and inevitably they couldn’t match it.
Still, so far it’s been a good year. Sonic Youth and The Jesus and Mary Chain, and it’s only April. All I need now is the rumoured My Bloody Valentine tour to come true and I’ll be a very happy boy.

Quite an interesting, if slightly long-ish article here describing a day in the life of a near-future street, in particular the data flows between the various entities that interact on it.

Some of these types of articles can have a bit too much gee-whiz about them, but this one I quite enjoyed because a) it was pretty much all tech that exists in a commodity form today and b) all the failures and solutions-not-quite-working-out-as-planned had a certain ring of truth about it.

I’m a massive Sonic Youth fan, and have been for close to 20 years, but I also know that at their worst, Sonic Youth gigs can run the risk of devolving into self-indulgent art-rock wankery. I’ve been at Sonic Youth gigs like that. Thankfully, last night’s performance of Daydream Nation at the Enmore Theatre avoided this trap, for the most part.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I arrived a few songs into The Scientists’ set, and even though I’m not familiar with Blood Red River, the album in question, I was mighty impressed. Kim Salmon was a wailing rock banshee, and the band set the bar pretty high for Sonic Youth in terms of feedback-fueled groove. Definitely will be checking out this album now.

However, good as The Scientists were, we were all here for Sonic Youth, and out they strode in front of a gigantic homage to the album cover, Gerhard Richter’s ‘Kerze’. Without a word spoken, or even a smile to the audience, they launched into the dreamy prelude to Teenage Riot.

Photo used with kind permission of Vanessa © 2008

At this point I started to wonder if this was going to work. I’ve listened to this album so many times, it’s ingrained. Knowing exactly what song is going to come next, all they way through the gig, could be pretty boring, right? Well, in this case, not at all. No sooner had the squalling finish of Teenage Riot drifted off, than we were flung head-first into the thrash of Silver Rocket. Bloody hell, I’m tired already and it’s only two songs in!

This was the tone for the night. One familiar track after the next, not a word spoken by the band, all the way through to the end of Eliminator Jr. On a few occasions I sensed they were about to go off the rails, and prepared myself to go get a drink until they remembered they had an audience, but each time they seemed to pull themselves back from the edge.

Photo used with kind permission of Vanessa © 2008

With the final notes of the Trilogy ringing out, we got our first words from the band, some actual smiles, and they wandered off, only to come back a few minutes later to play some newer tracks. But somehow this was a different band. Thurston was chatty, and once Mark Ibold came on to relieve Kim of her bass-playing duties, she shimmied like she was trying out for the B-52’s. Most of the encore tracks were from more recent albums, especially last year’s Rather Ripped, but they dipped into the back-catalog for Drunken Butterfly, which live, rocked like I always imagined it would.

I came home with a sore back, sore feet, ringing ears and a grin a mile wide on my face. Not bad for a bunch of 50+ year olds.

A couple of months back I decided I was going to give Open Office another try. As I mentioned, I’d done this a couple of times before but never lasted longer than a week or so, mostly due to issues with Impress understanding Powerpoint files.
Well, I can report that Impress is dramatically better at this than last time I tried. In fact, it hasn’t burped for me once. I’ve opened uncounted presentations in the last two months, complete with animations, etc, without a single hitch. I’ve also created a number of presentations, shared them with the rest of the Powerpoint-using company, and not heard back a whisper of an issue. Top marks for this one Open Office!

To be honest, probably the only real issue is with Calc, the Open Office spreadsheet. In particular, around its Pivot Table equivalent (sorry, not sure what Open Office calls it). When I first opened an Excel sheet containing a Pivot Table, I was horrified. All my beautiful Pivots no longer worked. After my momentary panic, I discovered that Calc does indeed have a similar facility, it’s just seems to not be compatible with Excels. This is a bit of an issue, not just because I have lots of sheets with Pivots created in Excel (OK, I can recreate them) but because I need occasionally to share the pivots I create, and it seems to be broken going from Calc back to Excel as well. Not a show stopper, but one that hopefully will be addressed.

The other issue with Pivots is there seems to be no Pivot Chart equivalent. So, I’ve had to set my pivot up to what I think I want to look at, chart it, then if I change my mind and mess with the pivot, I have to redo the chart. Clumsy.

Still, not enough to make me uninstall Open Office, so my experiment goes on. Two months of using this in an organisation full of Office users with no major compatibility issues is not too bad in my opinion.

Note, I still haven’t sorted out what to do about Outlook. I need a replacement that deals with Exchange, including calendars. I sync my phone directly with the Exchange Server, so no need for ActiveSync support. Thunderbird + Lightning looks like it won’t be a solution until sometime after Lightning 1.0. Any suggestions?