[I’ll update this with some pictures later]

We’re back, after 4 and a half sweltering days in New York. We saw protests outside the UN (and realised that we had had problems getting a hotel on Manhattan because it was General Assembly week) a Barak Obama rally at NYU and I finally saw the Statue of Liberty (On my 3rd visit. I have this thing where I go to major world cities and completely fail to see the defining land mark, I must’ve been in Paris 10 times and swear I’ve never seen the Eifel tower (or if I have I can’t remember it)) and on Scott and Analise’s advice explored Brooklyn where we found an awesome restaurant.

As predicted I got an Ipod Touch it was kindly bought for me by Emma as an early birthday present. I did some ‘testing’ on it this morning: vaulting a barrier near Kilburn sorting office it flew out of my pocket, landed on a corner (chiping the metal surround) and skittered half a meter across the pavement, screen down - yikes! Amazingly there are no scratches on the glass at all, god knows what it’s made of but its hard. I have to say though, whilst it’s an amazing piece of technology/ design (browsing the Wired web site from the sofa yesterday afternoon on a thin sliver of screen I felt just about as futuristic as I ever have) there are some ways in which it’s markedly inferior to my old 2nd gen block. Interface-wise it’s a step back from the brilliance fo the scroll wheel (though the extended functionality necessitates this to some extent, the original ipod was a supremely focused piece fo technology the touch is more general purpose) and the addition of a pin number system (vital for protecting your email passwords etc.) has been thoughlessly placed right up front rather than on specific security sensitive functions, entry is required to skip a song or change the volume. The closed nature of the platform is frustrating too, but hey it can only be a matter of time before some decent 3rd party apps come along and fill in the gaps Apple has conspicuosly (and predictably) left, though a software fix is unlikely to sort out the irritating, and frankly insulting lack of a plug.