Cornwall in March

Cornwall, the county in the West. A holiday destination for millions, drawn along the A39 by the promise of sun, sand, surf and sea-themed adventures. In the summer Cornwall is a riot of life and activity. The beaches, roads, pubs and hotels are thronged with happy visitors, all looking for a little light entertainment, outdoor exercise and stress-free downtime.

But what if you travel out of season? What if, in order to take advantage of your remaining holiday allowance and some cheap deals on cottage rental, you visit out of season, in March, for example? What, in this summer holiday specialist, do you find to do in winter?

Firstly, it's safe to say that Cornwall in March isn't as lively as Cornwall in, say, late May. In fact, you would have to work hard to find a holiday hotspot that was quieter than Cornwall at this time of year and that is the first good thing about visiting the county in March; no queues, no traffic jams, no waiting. Of course, it also means fewer shops, no beach activities and quiet, laid back atmosphere; whether or not this suits you depends almost entirely on how much shopping you want to do.

There are a few things you might consider doing:

• Cream Tea - Cornish scones with jam and clotted cream and served with a good pot of team are one of life's little luxuries. Whether you have scone-jam-cream or scone-cream-jam matters little (although one is obviously incorrect) as long as you get a good one; our favourite is place for cream teas is The Dwelling House in Fowey. Fresh (still warm) fruit and plain scones, great jam and large quantities of clotted cream, all backed up by a good selection of teas.
• Quiet Time - head for the Bedruthan Hotel and Spa for a £30 lunch and spa access deal. You'll find good food, friendly staff and a spa with views across the bay to the sea.
• Padstow - head to Padstow for art galleries and good food (much of it from the restaurants and cafes of Rick Stein). You can walk the beach if the weather holds or shop for paintings, sculptures and other holiday mementos if it doesn't.
• Penzance and St Austell - some towns are best saved for the summer when they are busy and the sun is shining. Avoid in winter.
• Eden Project - probably the easiest, if most expensive, way to see plants while avoiding the sleet. Definitely worth a visit if you like looking at trees in a hot, sticky environment.
• Walks - if you are lucky and the weather treats you to a day of dry sunshine, head for the cliffs or moors for a walk around Cornwall's rugged landscape. Fowey to Polkerris to Gribbin Head to Fowey is a decent walk, especially if you grab a cream tea at the end.

Overall, Cornwall in March can be great if you dodge the weather (or dress for Arctic conditions). Same again next year?

Religious Business

Religion is, in many respects, the ultimate example of capitalist business. By stripping back the business of religion and comparing its products and methods with other modern companies we can learn much of how churches and their related industries have survived, and flourished, for so long.

The long-term survival of new companies is not guaranteed and most fail within a few years. Even one-time market leaders like Nokia, Marconi or Rover can be rapidly reduced or destroyed by new market entrants, changes in the law or emerging technology. The churches, and in this case I am thinking of the Catholic Church and the Church of England, are amongst the oldest continuously operating institutions in the world; how have they done it?

The key to their long-term success is their product, which remains desirable even as customers become more enlightened. With a finite lifespan humans are naturally drawn to products that offer to extend their experience time and so the Church's core product, ever-lasting life in paradise, has a strong appeal and is readily peddled by any salesman prepared to make unsubstantiated promises to his customers.

Not only is the product highly desirable it has essentially zero marginal production costs since it is a service delivered exclusively post-mortem and sold through a highly-scalable and long-established network of local and regional facilities. The cost of sales and customer acquisition are reasonably high - churches must be built and maintained, political support must be obtained and retained and considerable effort must be made to avoid legislation covering workplace equality and related issues - but at core the product is basically free to produce and the Church's longevity means that it has accumulated vast assets with which it can weather even the most dreadful disasters.

The fact that the major product is delivered only after death also means that post-sales service and customer returns are both minimised. Every customer can be assumed to be happy and if they aren't there's nothing that can be done anyway.

Apart from the physical infrastructure, the only other major cost for the Church is the hiring of new salesmen and managers, who undergo long period of product training before starting work. This training is primarily to familiarise new employees with the huge volume of (sometimes contradictory and impenetrable) sales literature produced by the Church over the centuries. Mastery of this literature can take years but fully trained employees often stay with the firm until retirement and can generate revenue and attract new customers for decades; some former employees remain useful for marketing purposes for millennia.

Given all this, why do religious organisations have charitable status? They compete for customers and resources (personnel, property etc.) with other entertainment and lifestyle management businesses but enjoy an unfair tax advantage whilst discriminating on the grounds of gender and sexual orientation.

The answer is simple; disestablish the Church of England and end privileges for religious organisations, putting them on the same basis as all other companies.

Apple and Old Technology

Apple's current line of mobile devices, iPhone, iPad and iPod, are sleek, modern and exceptionally well-made. They are assembled with cutting edge techniques, pushing the boundaries of what is possible in the machining and assembly of aluminium and glass. They feature modern processors designed to maximise performance while minimising battery drain and heat generation. They have a sophisticated proprietary connector, Lightning, that is small, neat, solid and reversible. The "innovate and iterate" strategy has given Apple a range of market-leading products that generate huge profits and whatever you think about them there is no denying that they are enormously successful.

Amongst all this fantastic 21st century technology there is one element that stands out as old, preserved beyond it's years and ripe for replacement. It's so common, so familiar and so well-established within its niche that you've probably never noticed its age or heritage or questioned why it hasn't previously been replaced. In fact, when I suggest that it is inevitably something that Apple will ditch you're likely to protest and you may even rant about standards, arrogance and how it simply isn't possible to displace such an entrenched system. I disagree; it is both necessary and desirable to retire old technology so that new and better solutions can take their place.

And the item of which I speak, the humble 3.5mm headphone socket, is well past its prime, having been designed for use with transistor radios in the middle of the 20th century. Surprised?

Apple have a history of retiring systems when better (faster, cheaper, easier) alternatives become available and they have often surprised observers by dumping "vital" features while the rest of the industry carries on unchanged. Why would they want to do away with the 3.5mm headphone socket? There are two good reasons, from Apple's perspective:

• Size - have a look at the photos of the bottom of the iPhone 5 on Apple's website; the 3.5mm socket is huge in comparison with the overall depth of the phone. Apple may not be able to slim the iPhone, or the iPad, further if they stick with the 3.5mm socket.
• Manufacturing simplicity - removing the 3.5mm socket saves machine time (one less hole in the case), reduces component count, lowers assembly costs and frees up internal volume for alternative uses.

If there were no obvious alternatives then even Apple might balk at such a large change but there are at least two; 1) Bluetooth connection, or 2) the Lightning connector (which provides a standard USB audio output) with appropriate adapters or headsets.

The 3.5mm headphone socket is used on all Apple's major products so a change wouldn't be simple. If Lightning can be pressed into service (and I suspect it includes USB audio for precisely this reason) then it makes sense to refresh all the mobile products, including laptops, in one go. It might never happen but I think the 3.5mm headphone socket will be replaced by Lightning on all Apple's products at the 2014 Autumn product refresh.

Ibis Paveletskaya, Moscow

Moscow is a famously expensive city to visit. Good hotels, of which there are quite a few, can be found in the city centre but only at rates (£500+ per night) that would make even residents of cities like London or Paris, who we might expect to be accustomed to being fleeced by service companies, wince and complain. That doesn't mean that there aren't "cheap" hotels to be found but it does mean that they aren't necessarily very good or, in fact, cheap.

One such hotel is the Ibis Paveletskaya, located about three kilometres south of the centre of Moscow in a pretty average district opposite a strange modern church (probably - it's difficult to discern the precise purpose of some buildings when you can't read the signs on their exterior).

The Ibis is by no means a destination hotel; you would choose to visit only if you had business in its immediate vicinity or if you were financially constrained. That's not to say that there is anything particularly wrong with the hotel, it just doesn't have the facilities that you might want if you were expecting to spend time in the hotel itself. If you simply want to use the hotel as a base of operation then the beds are warm and comfortable, the showers are clean and the price (about £180 a night) isn't too bad (although in any other city you would probably feel a little put out if asked to pay more than £60).

The good points are the price (very low compared to other hotels in Moscow), the availability of wifi (fast and free throughout the hotel, as it should be everywhere) and the comfort of the rooms (warm, if basic and unpleasantly decorated).

To deliver the low price, however, they have cut a few corners. The restaurant, while serving reasonable (if basic and very dull) food is a soulless, poorly decorated room that wouldn't look out of place in a British holiday camp from the early 1980s; in other words, it's grim. There are no exercise facilities, gym or swimming pool; a jog around the hotel's locale, especially in February, holds absolutely no appeal whatsoever. The business facilities are pretty much non-existent; if you can do all you need with a wifi connection then you should be fine but if not the hotel won't be able to help.

Finally, you won't be bringing guests back to the hotel bar to impress them. Located in the foyer, the bar is very basic and although it's perfectly serviceable in terms of supplying coffee or alcohol it isn't going to feature in a "Top 10 Hotel Bars" compilation.

Would I return? I would hope not to but, given the average price of hotels in Moscow, I think it is entirely possible that I would end up at the Ibis again if I ever returned to the city. My preference would be to stay elsewhere but the Ibis is at least safe, clean and bathed in free wifi.

Navigating the Moscow Metro

It sounds like a small task, easily completed; navigate across Moscow using the the Metro. Such a thing is simple in London or Paris or New York, where language, alphabet and layout are readily understandable by first-time tourists, but Moscow is different in several important ways.

The most obvious problem is the alphabet. If you're not familiar with Cyrillic characters it can be difficult to recognise the names of the stations, particularly if the directions from which you are working are written in tourist-friendly Latin characters. To prepare for this you need to know the Cyrillic name of the stations on your route and preferably you need to be able to identify them in both upper and lower case characters in a variety of scripts or fonts.

When you know where you are heading your next task is to find the right Metro line. The lines are numbered and colour coded so that, unlike the London Underground, you don't need to remember the name of the line you want to take. Unfortunately, it is not always immediately obvious which line a platform serves and if you apply your experience of the Tube it is easy to miss overhead signs and, without realising, travel along the wrong line.

Two things exacerbate this problem. Firstly there are almost no maps to be found in the stations so by the time you get to the platform you have to be sure you are in the right place because you probably won't be able check that you are still going in the right direction. Secondly, there is a strange tendency for information about several lines to be presented together as a list of stations on the wall opposite the platform; it isn't clear whether this describes the trains leaving from the platform, the lines passing through the station or something else entirely.

If you do find yourself travelling in the wrong direction or on the wrong line it can be difficult to work out what's going on because the station names generally aren't clearly displayed on the station (unlike London, where the station names are everywhere). When you do spot the station name it's often in a small font on a sign that isn't particularly clear, especially if you're suffering from Cyrillic character recognition issues.

Finally, there are the crowds. Even though the carriages and platforms are long and wide there are so many people using the system that the trains, entrances and exits get very crowded indeed. You need to allow lots of time for getting into and out of the very deep tunnels that form the system and if you don't like being crushed together in a large underground chamber with hundreds of other people you should probably consider travelling on foot.

On the plus side, the stations are magnificent, the trains are fast and regular and the tickets are cheap; if you can master the navigation, Moscow's Metro is by far the best way to move around the city.

Skeuomorphism

Skeuomorphic design has been hitting the headlines recently (in the specialist tech blogs, at any rate) because of Apple's use of the technique in their iOS and OS X operating systems. The name of the game is to make your software easier to use by including visual elements based on real-world items. You can see an example of skeuomorphism in action in Apple's iBooks app, which presents text in the form of a book, with page-turning animations and shading along the spine (along with other visual tricks to make the iPad look like a physical book). Whether or not you like this sort of thing depends almost entirely on personal taste. Steve Jobs liked these features so iOS is stuffed full of them, from iBooks to Calendar (designed to look like a desk calendar) to Contacts (looks like a tabbed contact book) to Find iPhone (looks like a folded map). Jony Ive apparently doesn't like skeuomorphic design and the recent changes to Apple's corporate structure, notably the departure of Scott Forstall, have prompted many pundits excitedly to predict the end of skeuomorphism in a flurry of app updates in iOS 7. To me that doesn't seem very likely. Would they really want to make large changes to most (all?) of there core apps? I suspect not but I think it's very likely that they will begin to remove some skeuomorphic features with the next release of iOS from the apps where those features no longer make sense or where they add little value. In some apps the first steps have already been taken. iBooks, for example, now has a continuous reading mode that allows you to scroll through the text without the (somewhat tedious but undeniably beautiful) page-turning effects of the original version. This takes some getting used to but it provides a much smoother interface and the removal, or at least the invisibility (since you can turn off the feature if you want to), of the skeuomorphic features doesn't in any way detract from the usability of the app. Could this, or should this, be extended to other apps? Apple will doubtless change their apps as and when they decide that doing so improves the user experience and, at least in my mind, removing the skeuomorphic features would probably be a good thing in most cases. It's likely that defining new interface elements that bear no resemblance to their real-world counterparts will improve usability once users get used to the changes and in many cases users probably won't have any problems at all. In the end, of course, it doesn't really matter whether you have buttons that look like buttons and pages that turn while you're reading a "book" as long as you can work out how to do everything you need to be able to do. Minimalism has some appeal and interfaces like those in Letterpress show that there are alternatives to skeuomorphism that work just as well. Exciting times are ahead of us.

Marriage Equality

On Tuesday the House of Commons will vote on the latest version of the Government's Marriage (Same Sex Couples) bill. The most surprising aspect of the process is that it has taken so long to get to this point; a simple correction of an obvious inequality should not have required so much consultation and argument.

The bill's opponents have been vocal and their predictions of the impact of the legislation have been apocalyptic. Opposition has been led, as has so often been the case in the past, by the Church of England and other, even less representative, religious cults. God, we are told, is very upset about attempts to "redefine" marriage away from the biblical "norms", despite the total lack of clarity in his guidebook (see here for a list of the types of marriage God has allowed) but he isn't able to put in a personal appearance to influence the debate or clarify his policies.

The Churches are backed by a variety of right-wing politicians who, if they aren't motivated by crude religious beliefs, presumably think that their constituents will be impressed by a display of old-fashioned bigotry. Today, these politicians stand shoulder-to-shoulder with the ghosts of colleagues from previous generations, trying to hold back the tide of reform. Their arguments, often bolstered by the teachings of an unsophisticated religion (often, but not always, some form of Christianity), have been used many times to justify inequality, oppression and discrimination and to block the development of a fairer, more caring society.

The rest of us, however, have moved on. We see the value of equality and the destructive, unpleasant power of discrimination. We want to live in a country where rights and opportunities are not limited by gender, race, age, religion, class or sexuality. We recognise that the desire of a minority of out-of-touch individuals to discriminate is based on unfounded worries and justified by flawed arguments that lack evidential support. We are familiar with the arguments made by opponents of marriage equality, having heard them when earlier generations fought for the abolition of slavery, the emancipation of women, the decriminalisation of homosexual acts and the establishment of Civil Partnerships.

In short, the dire predictions made by opponents of marriage equality have never previously come to pass when made by similar people about similar reforms and there is absolutely no reason to believe that society will collapse on Wednesday (or at any point thereafter) as a result of the bill being passed on Tuesday. Some MPs will still vote against, of course, but they will quickly be seen as bigoted extremists whose value to the country and Government has been greatly diminished.

After this, of course, the next target for reform is the Church of England itself, which enjoys a strange and undemocratic position at the heart of Government. Removing the bishops from the House of Lords and disestablishing the Church will take us just a little closer to a fair and equal society.

Base2stay, Liverpool

My rule of thumb with hotels is to write reviews only after staying at least two nights so that I have had time to experience (or at least discover) all that the hotel has to offer. The larger the hotel, the longer this takes; the inverse is also true.

Base2stay in Liverpool is an unusual exception to the rule. It isn't in the same league as monsters like the Marina Bay Sands but with 106 rooms it also isn't so tiny that you might expect a one night stay to tell you all you need to know. This is the clever bit; apart from the rooms and the 24hr reception desk, Base2stay doesn't have any facilities. None. Not even a small bar. It's brilliant.

So now you're probably wondering how a hotel without facilities could ever be called brilliant. What if you want to exercise? The hotel has neither gym nor swimming pool. Food? There are vending machines, a breakfast delivery service (which I didn't use and so can't comment upon) and microwave ovens in the rooms but no restaurant. Drink? Nope, you're on your own, although there are tea and coffee making facilities. Club, casino, conference room, business centre, concierge, room service? Again, no, not at this hotel.

What the proprietors have done, and done with great skill, is boil down the hotel experience to its absolute essentials; room, bed, bathroom, peace and comfort. They've done this by removing all the extras, the things you might use occasionally but that you can also obtain, often at far lower price, from third parties in the surrounding area.

What you do get is a modest room at a reasonable price in an elegant, comfortable building. Wifi is included in the price, as it should be in all hotels (see earlier rant on this subject), and there are plenty of power sockets in the rooms (including, I noted with interest, a Euro socket). Hidden or missing power points has, like expensive wifi, long been a bugbear of mine; it is my considered opinion that hotel rooms should have multiple, unused power sockets in each room to facilitate the convenient charging of phones, tablets and laptops. Base2stay delivers, with two sockets on each side of the bed and more at the desk.

The bathrooms are basic but comfortable. You don't get the full range of accessories (sewing kit, razor etc.) that you might get in some five star hotels but does anyone ever use those things? I don't, and I don't miss them when they're not in the bathroom. What I want is a good shower, fluffy towels, plenty of hot water, well-maintained surfaces and a decent light to shave by. Again, Base2stay delivers.

My conclusion is that if you want the absolute pinnacle of luxury and the added convenience of on-site facilities, just in case you need them, you'll want to look elsewhere. If you just want a comfortable place to sleep, Base2stay is definitely worth confiding. I will return.

PC Disappointments

Most of the advantages (and, to be fair, the disadvantages) of working on an iPad are pretty obvious as soon as you start to use one but there are also some more subtle differences, things you might not notice for months or even years. I've been using PCs, in one form or another, since 1994 (before then computers were mostly single-tasking and were not really comparable to today's machines) and Windows PCs have been my primary working tool since I graduated in 1995. How can I so quickly have come to expect my Windows laptop to work the way that the iPad works and to offer the same features? Let me give you an example.

The iPad is basically an Internet communication device; whenever it is connected to the net it will download your email, pick up your messages, look for app updates and so on. This all happens without user intervention and without specific apps being open or active so it's totally invisible to the user. The practical benefit, which will be familiar to anyone with a modern smartphone, is that if you have a 3G connection or if you wander through a wifi hotspot you will immediately have access to your latest email and any emails you wrote since you were last connected to the net will be sent.

The problem comes when you then expect your Windows PC to do something similar. I didn't bother to check my email this morning because I imagined that the file I wanted to work on, which was emailed to me yesterday (I know this because it's sitting, unreadable, on my iPad), would be available for me to access because my laptop had been connected to the Internet yesterday afternoon.

This is clearly nuts. I've always known that PCs need their email clients to be open before they will download email, so how has it been possible for the iPad so quickly to change my expectations? The answer is that background downloading of email, with or without the client being open, is just a much better way of working and to do anything else now seems quaint and antiquated; it is simply natural to expect your connected devices to have ready the things you need to use and any device that doesn't do this feels somehow broken.

So is there an alternative? Can a Windows PC be configured to retrieve email, without having to open Outlook, so that Outlook can then still be used as the primary email client? I haven't ever heard of such a service but I am now actively looking for one.

In this example the elephant in the room, as it were, is the inability of the iPad reliably to open Word 2010 documents, even if you try to import them into Pages. It's not clear to me why Apple hasn't resolved this issue but maybe it's on their 2013 roadmap. Either way, I don't see an immediate solution to my iPad/Windows email confusion, unfortunately.

What I want to see from Apple in 2013

2012 was a mixed year for Apple. They had several hugely successful product launches (iPhone 5, iPads 3 and 4, a load of well-received laptop and desktop updates, etc.) but also some embarrassing cock-ups (Maps being the biggest problem). It doesn't seem likely that the mistakes will bankrupt Apple any time soon (their cash pile has grown to $120bn - another 2012 success) but there seems to be an atmosphere emerging around the company that isn't entirely positive, suggesting they've got some work to do to retain their "cool", "innovative" and "it just works" reputation. Here's what I'd like to see:

Maps is by far the most elegant mapping and navigation app on the iPhone but it lacks data, detail and features. Mapping is difficult and requires integration of many disparate data sources but its also a key feature in modern smart phones and Apple have to get it right. In 2013 I want to see an improved points of interest database, massively extended Flyover coverage and a much more detailed set of maps. Street view would be a nice to have but that's clearly an enormous job.

iCloud is an absolutely fantastic service but it seems to be a bit unreliable for 3rd party applications and the user access points, like the website, are rather limited. Improved reliability, additional storage (5Gb is enough, just, to backup only a single device), easier access and lower cost would all be sensible improvements for 2013. Adding the features found in Dropbox would be a nice feature to have, although displacing Dropbox (whose integration with iOS apps is peerless) might now be a tough challenge.

Siri. Sometimes brilliant, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny. It's a great tool in some situations but it simply isn't good enough to be relied upon daily and don't even think about demonstrating it to your Android-loving colleagues unless you've practiced your test phrases and you know exactly what they're going to do. More data, more features and improved accuracy are all expected in 2013.

Closer integration between Mac OS X and iOS would be nice, especially if an improved iCloud allowed for slick sharing of files between both operating systems and applications. The walled garden approach is great in many respects but having a few gates to allow data to move easily between applications would improve things no end.

None of this is new, of course. Apple are undoubtedly already working along these lines and it is in fact inconceivable that there aren't other, better, more exciting and further reaching improvements to these services, and others, scheduled to launch this year. The most important Apple feature remains "it just works" but at the moment it might be more accurate to say "most things just work, some are a bit flakey".

There's also little to criticise about the rate of hardware improvement, especially if, as rumoured, Apple have moved to a six-monthly refresh cycle (see iPad). 2013, I think, is all about the software and services