Since the age of 18 I’ve had five different handsets. Each one has slowly worked their way through the denim in my jeans.

It was late 1999 when I strolled into an Orange store, ID and Solo card at the ready, and signed up for my very first mobile contract. The handset was a special one. A Nokia 7110.

It’s often remembered as the handset that Neo dropped from a great height after a brief chat with Morpheus (this is actually false – the 7110 is a far more attractive phone than it’s younger brother, the 8110 featured in The Matrix).

The 7110 was a joy to behold. It’s most obvious feature was the spring loaded cover that shot down to reveal the backlit keyboard at the push of a button (a perfectly placed button at that – accessed with the tip of your right index finger).

At the turn of the century Nokia were the undisputed kings of mobile phone design – both software and hardware.

Colour screens were still a few years away from the mass market but the monotone screen I took home was bright, responsive and easy to navigate.

The 7110 had an innovative ‘navi-roller’ button which allowed me to easily scroll through menus and messages, editing and selecting when clicked. Smart.

It was my first introduction to what felt like a whole new language – T9 predictive text. Who would have thought that typing out a lengthy text message on a numeric keypad could be so easy?

You can always tell those that shunned T9 by the amount of text slang they use. I despised such shortcuts, and continue to do so to this day, much to the joy of my Grandma. (Incidentally, my Grandmas has appalling grammatical skills when it comes to text messaging. I think this is partly as she doesn’t know how to put a space between words or after punctuation.)

My recent research has uncovered something even more interesting about the 7110 – it was the first phone to feature WAP internet browsing. If only my 18 year old self could have known what mobile web-based delights awaited him.

My WAP connection was used heavily. Football scores, the odd slice of news and even the most woeful form of animated pornography could be viewed (you’ll have to take my word for it on the latter).

The one other thing that remains clear in my mind is a game. A game that I ended up losing a ridiculous number of hours to. Snake was a revolution. Actually, the 7110 came loaded with Snake II which had an odd shaped arena, but the basics were the same. Gaming perfection.

There are three things in my mobile history that I’m rather proud of. The first is that I’ve always had the same phone number. Secondly, I’ve always had a contract mobile, so I was never one of those kids that didn’t have any credit. Lastly, as a lover of gadgets I’m very proud to say that my very first mobile phone was a Nokia 7110.

What was your first mobile/cell phone?

I like to start the year off with a new desktop wallpaper. It’s a tradition of mine that dates all the way back to 2010.

The central theme of this years’ should be fairly obvious from the above image. Two weeks ago, in the early hours of Thursday 22nd December, a little lad named William was born. Our first child. He’s an absolute belter.

I’ve got big plans for this year but I’ve boiled my goals down to three:

1. Be a good Dad
2. Read 30 books (of which at least 15 must be works of fiction)
3. Draw every day

You can see my progress with point 2 on the right hand side of this site (from a desktop computer – this site is optimised for mobiles, don’t you know?). Titles in italics are currently being read.

From these three simple aims many more good things will come. Just you wait and see.

There are a couple of detail shots over at Flickr for anyone that might be interested.

The quote in full:

I love that there can be an art to nearly everything.
I love that geometry is ancient.
I love that Frank Lloyd Wright was shameless.
I love that the littlest things can make biggest differences, like cufflinks or a pinch of salt or just 5 minutes.
I love that some things are inexplicable, in fact more things than you’expect.
I love that no expertise is needed to appreciate a well-made thing.
This.
I love that you can pretty much always assume there is a better way.
I love that anything can seem new.
I love that a computer is referred to as a machine.
I love Chengdu and Hanoi and Lhasa.
I love that music doesn’t have to mean anything to be beautiful.
I love that there are theories about handwriting, the composition of matter, and horse racing. I love the knuckleball.
I love the lightbulb joke about how many boring people.
I love that the things worth remembering are usually the things that get remembered.
I love the moment at dusk when the F train comes out of the tunnel after Carroll St. and fills with golden sunset light and feels like a cathedral.
I love the slow motion replay.
I love the way that hat looks on you.
I love that Japanese architects deliberately inserted mistakes into their designs to appease the gods, who believe only they are perfect.
I love that the heart is a muscle.
I love the simplicity of punctuation.
I love the Radiator Building, the Queensboro Bridge, and summertime.
That perfect swing.
I love that line about how memory is like a train.
I love that anything is interesting if you look at it closely enough.
I love that even a cheap hamburger is still pretty good.

Taken from http://www.sampottsinc.com/

Change your Facebook profile picture to a cartoon character from your childhood and invite your friends to do the same. Until Monday (Dec. 6th), there should be no human faces on Facebook, but an invasion of memories! This is for a campaign against violence on children.

This is exactly as the ‘campaign’ appeared. Soon after, one by one, users started to change their profile pictures. Bananaman, Batfink and Tinkerbell. I didn’t take part, but if I had it would have probably been between Cedric Sneer or SuperTed.

The reason I didn’t join in the fun (aside from the fact that I’m a grumpy old man in the making) is that I spotted an immediate problem. One that, as a campaign, left it flawed from the start.

A friend of mine summed it up best:

If everyone who has changed their profile picture to a cartoon donated £1 to the NSPCC then that would make a real difference.

He was, of course, exactly right. Cartoons: good. Child abuse: bad. A memory can be a powerful thing, but changing your profile picture has done precisely nothing to out a stop to violence against children.

So who was the first person to start the viral status update? One tiny addition would have made a big difference. A link. Nothing more. All they needed to add was a link to a donations page to a charity such as the NSPCC.

Maybe they did. Maybe it got lost in translation, or someone forgot to copy and paste it in to their profile. Who knows?

To me, it exposed a deep flaw in the concept of Facebook, and heightened my positive view of rival social networking site Twitter. The concept of the almighty ‘retweet’ is simple yet brilliant. With the click of a button you can spread a message, link or idea (or all three) to all of your followers, in the hope that they will do the same. Wildfire.

With Facebook, it is not as easy. A thousand privacy settings keep your thoughts and feelings locked away. Great for those who like a quiet life, but rubbish when the time comes to actually get some work done.

To further compound the problem, an even more strange post started to filter through my feed:

The group asking everyone to change their profile picture to their favourite cartoon character is actually a group of paedophiles. They’re doing it because kid’s will accept their friend request faster if they see a cartoon picture. It has nothing to do with supporting child violence.

Lovely. Again, no link was given. All this did was remind me of the 2001 Brass Eye Special.

By this time, the NSPCC website was down, presumably from thousands of requests from people desperate to know whether the latest twist was true. Eventually, the charity issued a statement via Twitter saying that, whilst they had nothing to do with the campaign, they ‘welcomed the attention it had brought to the work they do’.

In reality, the debacle did nothing but cause confusion, and ended with a strange game of chinese whispers, when all that really needed to be shown was this: http://bit.ly/7sgXL

Update: This just in from Techland

Every now and again you find something on the web that makes you think ‘why the hell haven’t I come across this before?’

The Do Lectures are a perfect examples of this. I stumbled across my first lecture earlier this week when my latest hero, Craig Mod, posted a link to a talk he performed in September. I won’t lie to you – it blew me away. I delved deeper and found a raft of talks from the same and previous years.

Each year a select group of 100 people are invited to the event in Cardigan Bay, Wales. 80 audience members and 20 speakers. Speakers are asked to talk about what they Do. Simple.

I’m still working my way through the talks but the highlight so far is definitely the 2009 talk given by (my latest hero) Alastair Humphreys. I won’t say too much about him. In fact, I won’t say anything. Just watch the video above and I guarantee you’ll want to know more. You can follow Alastair on Twitter. Do it!