The Weekly Round-Up: 09.03.07

It's been a week of irony upon irony. And the Round-Up isn't talking irony in the Alanis Morissette simply-not-ironic-in-the-least-bit sense of the word. (Don't get the Round-Up started... these are old wounds.)

We're talking real life, couldn't-make-it-up, good old British 'irony'.

Example one: Imagine the Round-Up's surprise when, perusing its junk mail folder in Outlook, it discovered an email that wasn't actually a piece of spam had ended up in there.

At which point Ms Morissette would doubtless pipe up: "Isn't that ironic?"

No it isn't. Not yet.

Of course, this is actually a common problem, largely attributable to the fact Microsoft Outlook's spam filter is the high-tech equivalent of a nightclub bouncer in Croydon - letting any old rubbish through its doors until it totally and inexplicably decides to pick on one piece of mail for no apparent reason and send it packing.

But the piece of mail in question, which leads the Round-Up to a dawning sense of irony (yes, I really do think) was an invite to a press party.

"Now isn't that ironic?"

Not yet, no.

It was a press party for none other than Microsoft, emailed from a microsoft.com email address.

It's either brutally honest or woefully inadequate filtering... you decide.

Hundreds of 419 scams merrily dance past Microsoft's lame-duck filtering each and every day, accompanied by Korean spam, offers of miracle 'enhancements' (ahem), pump-and-dump stock tips, college diplomas and every other kind of spam you can think of.

The Round-Up's inbox looks like a who's who of email spammers and scammers and yet Outlook stands by like Blind Pew and lets it all past. But when an email from Microsoft appears on the cyber horizon Outlook gets all 'your name's not down, you're not coming in'.

Perhaps it's more discerning than we think.

(Before the Round-Up continues this two-part lesson in ironic nuance, it has some good news to impart… Yes! Surfing in on a tsunami of popular demand, it's the caption competition - back and bigger than ever before. You'll see what we mean by checking out this week's picture right here.)

Example two: More irony ensued when silicon.com reporter Gemma Simpson went on the trail of two psychologists this week who she wanted to talk to about the long term effects of the always-on culture we have created for ourselves.

Don't misunderstand, this isn't the hatching of an industrial tribunal against silicon.com (we hope), Gemma was researching an article on whether we are all turning into machines (not literally).

These psychologists were billed as experts in the field, able to talk at length about the impact BlackBerrys and mobile phones are having on our interpersonal relationships and our sense of worth and belonging in modern society.

Is this BlackBerry addiction becoming a case of the tail wagging the dog?

Has a wireless world turned us all into puppets?

How many metaphors can one columnist mix?

These were supposed to be the very people to answer such questions (with the exception of the last one) and advise Gemma - and therefore silicon.com's readers - about what can be done to avoid becoming a slave to the virtual grind.

Yet try as she might Gemma simply could not get these people to answer their phones.

So she emailed. Still no reply.

At this point the Round-up realised exactly what these two were up to.

They've not got all the answers; they aren't experts in finding the perfect work-life balance or even in managing the mindset of the modern worker in a world of ubiquitous connectivity.

They're simply not answering their phones.

That's like a doctor claiming to have an infallible cure for malaria and then revealing his secret formula to be: "Don't go to the tropics."

Either that or this was the first lesson for Gemma. Smart stuff.

Of course too many of us are indeed beholden to our various gadgets, be it a BlackBerry (you may call it a CrackBerry, if you're so inclined) or a mobile phone.

It can often seem as though there's no escape.

And certainly that's what UK Home Secretary John Reid is relying upon.

Over the past few years the UK government has gone through Home Secretaries like Liz Taylor went through husbands in her pomp.

And each one, try as he might, has managed to shoot himself in the foot or otherwise expose his inability to do the job at some point with a hair-brained initiative or universally unpopular project, such as the controversial ID cards plan.

John Reid, the current incumbent, has been biding his time.

But after - we presume - some lengthy planning (or a few pints of loud-mouth-soup and a hasty decision) Reid clearly feels his time has come and his department has unveiled a bold strategy for ridding the UK of illegal immigrants.

Reid's audacious plan involves sending visa-holding immigrants a carefully timed text message reminding them their papers are about to expire and they should make plans to leave the UK.

Genius. That should work.

What could possibly go wrong with such a thorough solution? After all, people overstaying their visas may not know doing so is against the law and will be only too pleased to get their reminder. It doesn't sound at all like it might just tip them off, if they were planning to overstay their welcome, and possibly encourage them to get a new mobile phone number.

Or alternatively, it will catch the low-hanging fruit - the majority of immigrants who are law-abiding, in the UK entirely legitimately and arranging to go home (now to the cry of 'time gentlemen please!') Meanwhile those intent on bending - or flouting - the rules will ignore the text messages should they get one.

Shadow home secretary David Davis, possibly feeling a little like Epicurus with such a feast of riches at his disposal, thought long and hard about where to begin criticising his rival's 'plan' before tucking in with a "serious admission of defeat".

Davis washed this down with an acerbic glass of: "John Reid is effectively giving up on trying to deport the hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants in this country, preferring instead to spam them with text messages."

Put like that it does kind of make it sound like the Home Secretary is clutching at straws from the tin pot. Heaven forbid.

"These sorts of measures are just headline-grabbing initiatives," dined Davis, possibly spotting a meaningless publicity stunt when he sees one.

"The issue here is that we should stop them coming into the country in the first place if they shouldn't be here," he added, ticking boxes left, right and centre for Daily Mail readers with a liberal use of 'them'.

At some point, somebody is going to point out that if John Reid knows all these immigrants well enough to have their mobile phone numbers (presumably not programmed into his own Nokia) then surely there must be a better way of going about this.

But for now the opposition are happy slinging insults his way.

To draw a tenuous comparison… the Round-Up has been physically manhandled out of enough pubs by now to know that a text message from the landlord at 23:15 saying 'time to go home, start drinking up please' would really not go very far to achieving its intended result.

And speaking of using technology to ensure everybody stays within the law - or at least to ensure transgressors are brought to book - a US cop struck upon a novel approach to crime-busting recently.

According to a report this week in US tech journal Wired, a patrolman was poring over surveillance footage of two men allegedly using stolen credit cards at hardware store Home Depot.

He reportedly recognised neither man and was therefore drawing a blank on how to progress his investigation.

Fortunately he didn't subscribe to the 'if at first you don't recognise the suspects, give up and go to the doughnut shop' school of policing - and set in place a plan which might be filed under policing 2.0.

Possibly after he had watched some videos of people dropping Mentos into bottles of Diet Coke and some clips of college teens shaving their friend's eyebrows, he decided he would put the video on YouTube and ask the wider world for help in identifying the men.

Before you could say 'civil rights', our web-aware cop had emailed the link to 300 associates and thousands of people watched the clip.

Ultimately the two men were identified and arrested, though he has subsequently credited 'good old-fashioned police work' for nabbing them and downplayed the impact of the clip being placed on YouTube.

But whether YouTube made the difference or not, this appears to be a growing trend in police work and further proof you can run but you can't hide from the internet.

And finally, here's a lesson to us all. If you find your new job a struggle or simply feel it's not for you don't stick around getting all depressed about it - just quit.

Walk out. Get on the next stagecoach out of town.

So what if you've only been there a couple of weeks. You gave it a go, what more can people ask?

Respected IT industry analyst Michael Gartenberg is certainly a proponent of this approach. Gartenberg recently left analyst house Jupiter to go and work for Microsoft. Even more recently he left Microsoft to go join, you guessed it, Jupiter.

Michael 'boomerang' Gartenberg, as his newly-new-again-former-ex-colleagues possibly call him, posted on his blog explaining: "At my core, I am an analyst. It's what I do and I do it well."

Get him!

"After much thought, I realise I'm just not ready to stop doing that job."

The Round-Up has been unable to stand up rumours that Gartenberg left Redmond because Bill Gates kept looking at him funny when he walked to the gents.

Gates meanwhile will have to console himself with news he is once again the richest man in the world, according to Forbes. His reported $56bn saw him once again secure the top spot in the annual who's who of the super rich.

It's alright for some.

Don't forget to tune in to the latest exciting instalment of the Weekly Round-Up podcast - it's not going to make you as rich as Gates but it might just put a smile on your face… (You can also subscribe to the R-Up podcast in iTunes, here - or pick up the XML file, here.)

Congratulations go out to last week's competition winner - John Ray - who correctly named the movie star mentioned in the podcast. Well done sir!