School holidays here.
Spending time with my daughters while my wife and son visit the in-laws in wild Wales has given me a chance to catch up on the spoken language, v. London 2006.
For example: "chirpsed" is what you want to be if you are a teenage girl walking around the high street hoping to be spotted by boys. You count the number of boys who chatted you up. That's your chirps score, to compare later with your friends.
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The trouble in East Timor is one of those stories we find hard to cover at the best of times.
Phone lines are poor, so we tend to rely on comment from outside the country.
Today, after a couple of failed phone calls and the difficulty the UN spokeswoman had even leaving her compound because of the shooting left us with little hard informaton.
We raised a good journalist in Jakarta, Indonesia. But that's more than two thousand kilometres away - a bit like covering Warsaw from London.
So we'd like to enlist your help.
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These days after the World Update programme, I'm taking part in a Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ familiarisation exercise called Here + Now.
The idea is to let Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ colleagues get their hands on all the new toys - sorry, technology - that is changing the way we deliver our programming and material.
Because I'm a gadget freak and I used to be an engineer, I get to help them press the right buttons.
it also gives me the chance to talk to them about their reaction to the digital future.
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As promised, some links to blogs of people we learn from, or who are contacts we use.
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There was a time, not that many years ago, when Afghanistan was one of the hardest places for us to cover.
Radio news needs fast reporting and the latest details.
TV news could rely on the impact of stunning, sometimes shocking pictures that occasionally emerged from the remote regions.
But for radio topicality matters, and we had trouble reaching anyone on the phone to tell us what was happening.
Sometimes we could use shortwave, but the result was hardly ever good enough for broadcasting. We got a newsreader to read the words the correspondent had shouted through the hiss.
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And furthermore on the immigration story, the following masterful mathematics from World Update's friend and favourite former intel officer, Vic Socotra.
Vic has listened carefully to President Bush's speech and thought through the plan.
The President, notes Vic, "said last night he is going to send as many as 6,000 national guardsman to the border. I tried to calculate the impact of the deployment. If the six thousand stood fingertip to fingertip, and assuming a span of six feet, that would enable us to go man-on-man with the migrants for nearly 36,000 feet, or over seven miles of border"
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Blog commentator Roberto C. Alvarez-Galloso sends a series of phone pictures of the May 1st 'Day Without Immigrants'.
Here are just a couple.
Roberto also tells us his views.
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Northern Ireland's politicians are getting paid for what exactly?
Well, they would say for representing their constituents in many ways, not least trying to create a lasting political settlement for the generations to come.
But they have to face the accusing stares of British taxpayers who are watching them taking more than $100,000 per annum while not sitting in their assembly or governing the province.
Meanwhile, Venezuela's President Hugo Chavez is winning fans amongst left leaning voters around the world, spending money his country earns from high oil prices - which he could spend at home, of course.
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Stephen Brown sends us some fine pictures from time to time.
Not news, but beautiful and real.
Here's one of his of spring blooms in Huntingdon Valley, Pennsylvania.
Here's a photograph taken by blog commentator Bob Hall in New York, of the 8 racers in the round-the-world yacht race, which made a stop in the marina at the World Financial Center NYC, near Ground Zero.
Bob also writes about going to the marina near the site of the September 11th attacks. I hope he doesn't mind if I share some of that with you.
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I know blogging comments have a life of their own, attached to the posts they refer to.
But I also know that the way the Internet works, some of those posts don't get a response until days, even weeks afterwards.
By which time they have slipped down the page.
So to avoid the danger that some excellent and perceptive comments will get missed, I'm copying-and-pasting.
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A couple of intriguing stories on the programme today about which I thought you might have information to share and opinions to offer.
(And thanks for the comments which are scattered through these posts and of such good quality they prove that blogs are more than just the refuge of people no one will listen to.)
Sicilians are turning against the Mafia, which bearing in mind the long and deadly history of that organisation is remarkable.
But can the capture of the leadership actually change the reach of corruption?
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I don't suppose the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ has done a lot of reporting from Barking, East London.
I know it rather well because I studied international law at the University of East London, which has part of its campus there.
Despite the fact that UEL cannot claim to have a glorious and ancient history - it was a technical college not long ago - it had a number of advantages for me.
Above all, its law department has a strong reputation.
And it was an ideal place to study international law because many of the students had fled from abuses of that law in conflicts around the world.
It brings a special quality and relevance to lectures on torture, for example, when more than a handful of your fellow students have lived through that kind of abuse.
It also helped that one of the lecturers had abandoned a well paid job in the prosecutors office of a large nation which proclaims its democracy because he got fed up with calls from 'the big man' to drop the charges against some crony or other, after months of careful evidence gathering.
Now Barking has made it onto the Βι¶ΉΤΌΕΔ World Service because its voters have gone in large numbers for the anti-immigration British National Party.
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If you want to find out how the visionaries are thinking about the future of the Internet and digital delivery, then take a look at .
They are exploring what is often called Web 2.0 - which is one of those futuristic terms that people have found hard to define.
The best explanation I've come across is that instead of simply text and graphics websites, the next version uses, and mixes, the full range of entertainment and communications.
Movies on demand. Music collections on your home wifi network.
Video phone calls that become television programmes and radio programmes that produce images, and so on and on.
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Time for me to mention a few of the blogs I like to read.
This could be in the form of a blogroll alongside the posts, and one day probably will be.
For now, a few links.
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Nice picture just in from regular NY listener Bob Hall celebrating 75 years of the Empire State.
I know that part of 5th Avenue is a bit trashy but it's still one of my favourite places to sit with a cappuccino. Thanks Bob.
One of our guests this morning, Prof Sharon Beder, marking the traditional workers' holiday May 1st, said the work ethic was going to eat itself.
People are not getting the better lives they were promised in return for working ever harder.
Instead, they are realising they have been pressured by marketing and education systems into becoming hyperconsumers.
So they'll stop working.
There's a lot to argue about with this, and I hope you will.
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| 17:39 UK time, Tuesday, 30 May 2006
