These are Sommarfint straws, bought last week from IKEA. They’re very colourful!

Glitzen, who lives at the Metrocentre, is preparing for hibernation until November next year (or thereabouts).

This is the oak-lined avenue at the Gibside estate in the Derwent Valley, with the column of Liberty in the background.

When I did photo-a-day in 2012, I got a lot of stick for the number of times I featured the Ouseburn… so where better to start a new series! Today’s photo shows the Ouseburn as it flows through Jesmond Dene.

I love ByBox, a service which delivers my parcels to convenient local lockers for me to collect, rather than attempting to deliver to my home when I’m out.

But do you know what would be even more convenient than that? A delivery in a two-hour timeslot of my choice (eg a more realistic 9-11pm), like Tesco offers for groceries and Tesco Direct.

It seems like it wouldn’t take much to set up a processing centre like ByBox’s to ship my parcels to, and for Tesco to then internally process these exactly as it does with Direct orders – delivering from my local store in a timeslot of my choice (at a price), or sending them along with my hypothetical groceries, or allowing me to pick up 24hrs a day.

C’mon, Tesco, make this happen, and we’ll hope that all the other supermarkets follow in your wake.

It’s hard to imagine that there are many people left that haven’t seen this clip by now… but isn’t it nice to see two people defending decisions of conscience on an issue? While Rudd got the better of the exchange, I think this is exactly the kind of open discussion that raises the standard of debate.

And – as a sidenote – isn’t the constant distraction of the Twitter stream at the bottom of the picture irritating in a way that’s symbolic of much that is wrong about TV’s obsession with viewer interaction?

My friend Jonathan Rothwell has blogged about Microsoft’s takeover of part of Nokia today.

I haven’t had chance to read any of the coverage around this yet, so this is truly uninformed opinion. The first thing that occurred to me was: what on earth are the non-mobile parts of Nokia? But that’s somewhat beside the point of this post.

Jonathan says:

The general perception of Nokia is of an old stalwart, a cheap, reliable phone that would last basically forever. The perception of Microsoft, for people (like me) who grew up in the same period, is of an irritating anthropomorphic paperclip, which gets in your way and can be invited to show off.

I think he’s half right. When I think of Nokia, I think of the 3310. But when I think of Microsoft, I think of the annoying software that stops me from getting stuff done efficiently at work.

RIM, makers of the BlackBerry, are in meltdown. Yet the go-to business mobile remains the BlackBerry. There’s one sat on my desk right now. At least in part, that’s because BlackBerries are cheap and hard to destroy: exactly the virtues of the Nokia 3310.

So if Microsoft is smart – and that’s a big if – perhaps they can take BlackBerry’s market share and create a great, highly profitable niche in secure and indestructible business phones that integrate closely with their business software. Of course, this is a shrinking market with the spread of BYOD, but there will always be a core “BlackBerry” market, and it’s likely to always be a fairly highly profitable one, even if it’s small. And with a focus on the corporate customer, with e.g. usage charges rather than regular device refreshes, it’s a need that Microsoft is uniquely well placed to serve at relatively low cost.

Just a thought…

I don’t often post videos on here these days, but this one I really enjoyed. First Officer Jeff Skiles of the flight that ended up in the Hudson, and healthcare safety expert Terry Fairbanks lecture on what healthcare can learn from airline safety.

This picture is actually from yesterday morning, when Newcastle City Council measured the temperature as -8.4c and sent out a warning to motorists about grit being ineffective at such low temperatures. In the decade I’ve lived in the North East, I don’t ever remember that happening before!

This morning, it’s actually not too bad here. We’ve had little fresh snowfall overnight, though there’s a fair amount of frozen snow lying on the ground as there has been for some time now – though that’s not terribly unusual at this time of year. I believe the band of heavy snow is expected to affect us more tomorrow than today.

The snow has arrived in greater measure overnight… and now I feel like I don’t want to leave the house! In fairness, it’s not actually all that deep this morning – note the clear tyre tracks in the photo. Anyway, work awaits, so I guess I’ll have to venture out!