So the other day I was frittering away my short time on this planet (otherwise known as mucking around with Facebook), and I noticed the ‘people you may know’ list.

Hmm, interesting, turns out that I share a significant number of mutual friends with a group of people one might term ‘eminent’ – they’re not necessarily ‘famous’, but they’re at or near the top of their respective games, enough that I’ve heard of them and like what they do; and I just know I’d love to meet them, hang out with them, cook brunch, share haircare tips, you know the kind of thing.

Plus I think they’d get a kick out me, you know ? I’m a pretty interesting guy ? I’ve got a lot of interesting friends ?

Some people on this list (in no particular order) : Karl Bartos from Kraftwerk, Nik Zinner from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Golan Levin, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (well, I met him once very briefly in Paris, woo), the DJ Rob Da Bank (shared a terrifying car ride in Ibiza with him ten years ago), Mark Moore from S-Express, Neville Brody (famed font designer), Andrew Shoben (Greyworld), you get my drift.

Well, being the nerdy type that I am, of course this chain of thought got some gears clicking away in there :

What if Facebook created a ‘would like to meet’ button ? Or rather, what if I made a Facebook app called Would Like To Meet ? Or rather, what if some enterprising person or persons unknown read this post and do it ? I don’t really care, since I have other fish to fry.

It would work like this : you go down your ‘people you may know’ page and hit Would Like To Meet for the ones you’ve heard of, and would like to meet in real life.

Then you rank them into some kind of order. For instance, I’d definitely like to meet Karl Bartos more than Neville Brody (better synths), and I’d like to meet Limahl from Kajagoogoo more than Karl (better hair); so Limahl gets a ranking of 1, Karl gets 2 and Neville gets 3.

Important: your WouldLikeToMeet list remains totally private. So if you’ve got an embarrassing crush on the Chuckle Brothers, nobody needs to know.

So, every Facebook user in the world immediately rushes out and creates their own WouldLikeToMeet ranking list. It’s a bit of harmless fantasy wish fulfilment. What’s the result ? You guessed it, fellow computer science geeks – it’s a graph. And we can compute all sorts of interesting things from this graph.

Of the many interesting things we can compute, one of the more useful is something I’ll call Potential Karma; and it’s useful because it leads provably to better parties.

It works like this : if I really want to meet Limahl, and you’re a mutual Facebook friend, then if you introduce me to Limahl in real life (and we really get along, i.e. hang out on each others’ yachts, become godparents to each others’ kids, or even – really the ultimate seal – just become Facebook friends), then you get Karma Points – lots and lots of Karma Points. So given any list of people, we can compute Potential Karma – the Karma Points you’d accrue simply by getting them all in a room and introducing them to each other.

Leaving aside the question of what Karma Points really are, and how to exchange them for sexual favours money, “how can this lead to better parties ?”, I hear you ask…

You’re having a party; you’ve only got enough cocktail sausages and Vimto to invite 50 people. Question: which 50 people should you invite to maximise your Potential Karma ?

Well, that’s pretty tough for me to work out, but pretty easy for Mr Computer, especially if it’s on a server somewhere at Facebook Farms. And you can bet that a Potential-Karma-maximising party would be the best party ever.

So Eddy, next time you have a party, invite me and Nik and Limahl, and we’ll like totally hang out and stuff. It’ll be awesome.

To whom it may concern :

I’ve always been very fond of popping in to Waterstones to browse through the shelves – usually I’ll bypass the top 20 and the chick-lit and head straight for the heavyweights in the Fiction A-Z list. Not for me the Romance, Erotica, Crime and Science Fiction sections – clearly for inferior tastes, aren’t they ? That’s why they’re in their own sections and not in the main Fiction section.

So yesterday I walked into the Greenwich branch of Waterstones to find a new Special Interest section, ‘Black & Asian Writing’. Hm, interesting, let’s have a look at the selection of authors : lots of heavyweights – Arundhati Roy, Salman Rushdie, Maya Angelou, Yann Martel, Zadie Smith – and a bit of harmless fluff too (‘The Kite Flier’, anyone ?).

A quick check showed that none of those authors appeared in the main Fiction A-Z section. And herein lies the problem.

A charitable soul such as myself might note articles such as this one and think, ah, Jolly Good Show, Waterstones, you’re making an attempt to attract more Black & Asian Readers by creating a Black & Asian Writers section.

A less charitable soul (perhaps any of the writers I mentioned above ?) might take serious offence at being segregated in this manner, and cast down into the realms of the Dribbling Nymphos, Teenage Vampires, Spacefaring Nerds and Scandinavian Axe-Murderers.

I  am often told I am Black & Asian (well, of Indian extraction, rather than Chinese, Malay, Japanese or indeed Outer Mongolian) but I am a Reader first and foremost, and I choose what to read based on how good I think the book is, rather than on the skin colour or continental origin of the writer. If there are Black & Asian Readers out there who only want to read stuff by Black & Asian Writers, they’re blithering idiots, and Waterstones shouldn’t descend to their level.

Except you have, dear Waterstones, you have. So this is one Black & Asian Reader who won’t be darkening your doors again.

Well, until Rushdie’s back in the main Fiction A-Z section anyway. And someone officially calls Bullshit on Khaled Hossaini.

Yours Sincerely,

Ashraf Nehru

PS: Yann Martel looks kind of White to me…

The Fontainebleau Casino project, for which we were to do some cool LED art, but which fell victim to the recession :

The PepperMill, designed by Jar Jar Binks on ketamine :

The pool at the hotel, where they do a mean fish taco and margarita…

We took a little road-trip with Josh Goldberg to visit Red Rock Canyon :

Where Chris posed on some pink rocks :

We admired the stormy sky from the observation point (where we bumped into Michael and Cathy Eddy) :

And finished up with a steak dinner beneath the Eiffel Tower :

The Great Presentation Hall :

Drinkies and telly screens :

Partay at the flat of the guy who designed the Soviet Moon Lander !

Nightclubbing :

Looking for kebabs at 4am, we stumble upon a photo shoot :

Saturday : what they really get up to at the Glavnyi Universalnyi Magazin :

Obligatory Red Square Picture, with Wolf :

Mawenzi Tarn campsite, from above :

Kikelewa campsite looking down to the plains :

all thanks to my crazy popsk.

So, I went into Best Buy and dropped £600 on a brand new iPad.

First Impressions : this is definitely Version One, and there are a few kinks to work out. There’s a general issue with apps not recalling their state when you quit or change context – the app store, for instance, loses its place in the app list when you touch an app icon to find out more about it, and the ipod app loses its search filter when you quit out. Browser compliance isn’t great – for instance, I failed to edit this post fully on the iPad (and have to do it on my macbook). Lack of a camera is real disappointment because skype would rule on this thing.

Typing : I thought the big keyboard would be a super win, and it is – sort of. It’s a win if you place the machine flat on a desk, so you can use both hands – excellent for taking notes during meetings, also much quieter than a keyboard because there’s no clicking. When you’re holding it up, though, as you are when you’re sitting with the machine on your lap, typing becomes very slow. A small iphone-sized overlay keyboard that could be navigated quickly with one hand (while the other holds the machine) would be faster in that situation.

Standout experiences : youtube is amazing, google maps is stunning; autodesk sketchpad pro is fantastic and very useful; and the korg iElectribe is mind-bendingly addictive if you don’t mind flashing back to your twentysomething fantasies of being Richie Hawtin (and I don’t). This is clearly the controller system for live performance software – if I was still into DJing I’d be rewriting hummingbird on it for sure, as there seem to be no good DJing apps for it yet.

In summary – everyone is going to own one of these sooner or later, whether iOS or Android. The next version will be the one to own if you’re agnostic or unmoved by this one – a camera and a retina display would turn this into the perfect piece of tech. From my point of view, I bought this version because I want to learn how to code on it.

Next step : hello world, I guess…

To Paris to visit La Gaite Lyrique; from the rooftop of which you can see the whole of Paris. That’s the Eiffel Tower in the background, honest.

To Ölüdeniz, a charming fishing village that has been turned into Margate; where we chartered a massive pleasure boat all to ourselves (just the five of us) and embarked on a blissful day of island hopping, swimming and eating (and drinking beer), chased by another boat crewed by a contingent of amorous cougars and their long-suffering Turkish masseur.

To Kalkan, a charming fishing village that has been totally occupied by British people of, how can I put it, a certain social standing. Resulting in legions of restaurants serving detuned Turkish/international food at hugely inflated prices, playing Norah Jones and the World Cup as the sun sets behind the grieving hills.