The Weekly Round-Up: 16.01.09

A career in technology is full of glamour, excitement and many-coloured Ethernet cables.

Sadly, given the long hours there's little time for love and romance. Plus, if we are to put any credence behind the old myth, techies are about as adept at romance as elephants are at C++ coding.

Not that The Round-Up is putting any weight behind those myths. Unlike the University of Potsdam, just south of Berlin.

Most university courses contain the usual units on networking, software engineering and user interface design (and perhaps recycling).

However, budding tech workers are now being offered a different course: flirting.

The 440 students enrolled in the master's degree course will learn how to write flirtatious text messages and emails, impress people at parties and cope with rejection. The students are likely to get plenty of hands-on experience of the last of those, the Round-Up suspects.

The course is part of the social skills section of the IT course and is designed to ease entry into the world of work and office romance.

The course also intends to teach students body language, public speaking, stress management and presentation skills. And given the German fascination with David Hasslehoff you'd imagine that taking fashion tips from Knight Rider and Baywatch may well form part of the syllabus.

It's always the techies. You can't imagine the marketing and media studies students needing a course on how to chat up members of the opposite, or indeed same, sex.

Then again, computer science students get to graduate from university with a proper degree.

So let's get IT on...

Now, the Round-Up has seen plenty of prison dramas, from the gritty and soul-searing (Prisoner: Cell Block H) to the uplifting (The Shawshank Redemption) or just plain daft (The Whole Nine Yards).

Rarely, however, have they featured the peaceful yet earnest sounds of fingers on keyboard. Thus it may be time for script writers to rethink their tired prison clichés and update them for the 21st century and make their movies more You've Got Mail and less 'You've got 20 years in a cell with a nutter'.

silicon.com revealed this week that prisoners in London are being allowed limited access to some websites as part of a pilot project to help them resettle in the community. What's the strange noise you can hear? It's a collective combined 'harrumph' and 'tut' coming from the heart of middle England, upon hearing the news.

The Programme for Offender Learning and Resettlement Information Services is being trialled in eight London prisons and lets prisoners visit pre-approved websites to take part in online learning and job hunting.

The Round-Up imagines job hunting would be interesting if it was extended to the whole prison population.

"Congratulations, Mr White, we'd like to offer you the job. What's your current notice period?"
"Eight years, guv. Six if I'm a good boy."

But before any of those fuming denizens of middle England (who haven't already rushed off to write a letter to their local MP) pass out with moral outrage, it should be pointed out that there are safeguards in place to stop criminals surfing at Her Majesty's pleasure wreaking havoc via broadband paid for by decent, honest taxpayers.

These include blocks to stop prisoners browsing outside the list of approved sites, software keystroke and content loggers, no offsite hyperlinks and no access to "uncontrolled email". No word yet on the big rusty manacles that should make playing Quake all but impossible.

Cast your mind back to January 2001. Do you remember when the web was first a-twitter about a revolutionary product codenamed Ginger?

Tech luminaries such as Steve Jobs waxed lyrical about the mystery product. Jobs was alleged to have told inventor Dean Kamen that he wouldn't have to market it, cities would simply spring up to accommodate it.

The Segway Personal Transporter was finally unveiled to a breathless, anticipating world in December 2001 and greeted with... a smattering of polite applause.

George W Bush fell off one, so did Piers Morgan, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak has a few and, well, that's about it for the Segway revolution.

Cities have determinedly failed to construct themselves around them and by and large the only people that mention the Segway these days are tech columnists with a word count to meet on glacially slow news weeks.

Happily for fans of the Segway the product has a new champion, although, admittedly, not a very good one.

Yes, it's asteroid enthusiast and Liberal Democrat MP for Montgomeryshire, Lembit Opik.

Opik managed to raise the matter of the transporter in the House of Commons this week to try and convince MPs that Segways should be legal forms of transport under UK law.

His opening gambit was pretty cheesy, although the Round-Up has heard worse: "To paraphrase Shakespeare, I come to legalise Segways, not to praise them. The evil that machines do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their cogs, and so it could be with the self-balancing personal transporter. My goal today is to change that. I seek agreement to a pathway to determine how this creative, convenient and eco-friendly device may be formally embraced by the UK."

Opik spent some time evangelising the devices. When challenged as to whether Segways were wholly appropriate modes of transport for Britain's narrow, bumpy, Coke-can strewn pavements, he responded in the affirmative claiming that he used his own "road-based" Segway on the "byways" of Montgomeryshire.

The highly mountainous region of Montgomeryshire is hardly the most practical location for a Segway - a more practical mode of transport might be a mountain goat. Then again, daredevil Opik has already faced down the law, so nothing will stand in his way.

Indeed, Opik couldn't be stopped: "A self-balancing personal transporter is a celebration of human ingenuity, electrical innovation and the laws of physics.

"In fact, it appears to defy gravity by mysteriously keeping itself and a passenger of any shape and size upright, with no visible means of support, bar the wheels."

It's the gyroscopes, Lembit.

The MP declared an interest in the devices. The company had lent him a model and he had since bought one.

"I am now the most well-balanced parliamentarian in the UK, albeit with the assistance of gyroscopes - something I would have welcomed in 2008, but I digress."

Indeed Lembit...

A quick look at some of the other big news of the week.

So what do you want? Money or a longer contract? Can't we have both?

Looking for a job? Good luck - here's some handy tips.

And that's it for another week - there's always the caption competition to test your wit.