Is it okay, or isn't it?

You know when you get that sudden sinking feeling because you realise that you may have inadvertently done something wrong? Something triggers the putting of things together in your head and you have a moment of panic where the world wobbles a bit?

It happened to me today.

There I was, listening to the idle banter at work, and the subject of Top Gear came up, and I thought about watching the episode in question in iPlayer, the Beeb's phenomenally successful 'catch-up TV' player. Which is when the guilt suddenly overwhelmed me - it suddenly occurred to me that I had watched programmes on iPlayer at work, without a TV licence! I have a TV licence at home, but not at work...

Time moves slowly under these circumstances. The web browser crawled, snail-like, to the FAQs and an intriguing link to the TV licencing web-site, where it seemed to indicate that watching 'live' TV required a licence. The link away from the FAQs intrigued me, so I went back to the iPlayer web-site and dug around a bit more...

Which is when things got really interesting.

The iPlayer web-site and other places make it very clear that you can't watch a tv programme using iPlayer if it is being broadcast at the same time - a 'simulcast' - without a TV licence. But if the programme isn't being shown at the same time - 'live' - then you don't need a TV licence. All of which seemed clear enough, until I thought about what a 'simulcast' means...

Top Gear is one of the BBC's most widely sold programmes. Many countries show it, and so there is a finite probability that when you watch it on iPlayer, it is also being shown in one of these countries. Multiply that small but finite probability with the large number of people using iPlayer, and you end up with the realisation that for some of these people, they are watching Top Gear at the same time as it is being broadcast, somewhere in the world. Now with lots of countries showing it, and no easy way of finding out if is is being shown at the time that you want to watch it on iPlayer, this means that you have no way of knowing if it is being broadcast at the same time, and so you don't know if you need a TV licence in order to watch it. Alternatively, then you have to limit what you mean by a 'simulcast' to a limited geographical area, which it currently isn't...

So as far as I can see, there's no way of knowing for certain if you need, or don't need, a TV licence in order to watch a programme on iPlayer. So you can't know definitively if you are actually breaking the law, but you can work out, reasonably accurately, what the odds are that you are. Deliciously ironic, particularly since the more popular a programme is, the greater the chance of unknowingly breaking the law. I'm expecting the TV licencing people to start sending out demands any moment now...

DVD, CD, Game or Book?

Every year, at around this time of year, my immediate family ask me for 'The List'.

Over many long and challenging years, the difficult process of trying to find Birthday and Christmas gifts for me has evolved into a condensed form where I supply a list of things I'd be delighted to receive. This avoids any problems with sincerity after receiving after-shave, socks, small furry animals, gift tokens or, most unimaginatively of all: money.

The List has only a few sections, whittled down over time. These are:

• DVDs, of which I already have too many to watch, but I always assure myself that I will find the time to watch someday.
  
  
• CDs, which I consume when walking to work (and have run out of podcasts to listen to). Unlike DVDs, I don't think that you can have too much music. I have lots of CDs - the music business has done very well out of me over the years, which is why I'm confused that they want to punish me with DRM and other nasties that actively prevent me from listening to, and enjoying, music.
  
  
• Games, by which I mean video games. Games overtook movies as the major entertainment money-spinner some years ago, and I've been hooked since I first landed a lunar module on the Moon back at Liverpool University back in the 1970s.
  
  
• Books, which fight for the closing moments of each day before I go to sleep. I'd like to read more books, but there isn't enough time. I've tried audiobooks, and they are almost right, but not quite. Podcasts still hit the spot that audiobooks just fail to hit.

Of all of these, whilst I treasure them all, the books are the best. Perhaps it is because I know some of the effort that goes into them because I've done one, but this is a weak argument that I can see the flaws in as soon as I type it.

So here's my second try.

Of all of these, whilst I treasure them all, the books are the best. This is because I know that books will, with care, still be just as accessible and readable in twenty or thirty years time, and probably long beyond that. For the rest, then things are more uncertain. Optical disc technology was claimed to have a life of about twenty years, and some of my CDs from the mid 1980s are beginning to show their age. So I'm expecting the error rates to rise, and the technology to play them to vanish, over the next twenty years. But the books will survive!

A crowd of none.

There's always that feeling that whatever I do, someone has already been there, done that, got the tee-shirt, etc. The scope for being original seems to diminish daily. But then, just as I had written off breaking new ground, the unexpected pops up exactly where you were not expecting it. It happened to me this week...

Not an auspicious start: the new water cooler arrived at work. The old one had given its all for some years, but the fickle opinion of the office-denizens had been measured, and it said: 'Change!' So it was out with the old and in with the new. Which is when we discovered that an old friend can be familiar, worn-in, comfy, accepted, and more. In stark contrast, our new watery-dispersery-thingy was, well, not to put too fine a point on it: 'challenged in the attractiveness department'. Actually, it was more like something robotic from the 1950s, a sort of wet non-metallic blanket that oozed 'lack of late 2000s' style. It was, in a word: ugly.

Now these days, any pejorative or politically incorrect word can be a distinct advantage in certain quarters, and so I Googled 'ugly water coolers' in the sure and certain knowledge that there would be a whole host of web-pages bemoaning the passing of water coolers that had missed out on the cover of <insert suitable magazine title here> by just a hair's breadth, that there would be whole web-sites, fora and forums teeming with people discussing just how ugly it was possble to make a water cooler.

But there weren't any. Google drew a blank. You could hear the wind whistling through the air, and the tumbleweed scudding across the screen. Nothing. A crowd of none.

Until now, that is. The mere act of revealing in a blog that there are not hordes of angry orclets, orclings, orclers, orcifiers, uberorcs, orcles, miniorcs and otherorcs all sharing opinions on 'The Ugliness of the Cold and Hot Dispensing Water Cooler/Hotter' means that there is now something for Google to find next time, and you are reading it. If you are really suspiciously and amazingly lucky, then you are reading this before Google finds this, in which case, you have found it before it has been found!

So there you go. I found, fleetingly, something upon which Google had not cast its all-unseeing eye. And I promptly destroyed that which I had found, without malice aforethought, and without realising that I had been original. And in the act of being original, had removed the means for anyone else to be original in the same way. Gone. Forever. And you were here just as they started clearing away afterwards... (And I've used 'and' as the start of a sentence way too many times!)