Cue moral panic about the corruption of youth.  Some people (Susan Greenfield, a scientist who noone seems to like, or respect. Don’t know why) think all these games are rewiring our brains (because our bonces are, like, you know, actually circuit boards) and degrading our ability to think.

She’s right, up to a point. What’s really strange about the hundreds of millions of dollars being lavished on these games in these straightened times is that they are boring to play. They are great as movies. Technically dazzling. Full of clever features and so very, very, long. But they are about as satisfying to play as a melted lemon sorbet.

It’s obviously nothing to do with us having lost our way in game design. iPhone and DS games like Angry Birds are (mostly) fun to play rather than lavishly produced. They are, actually, games.

I think the reason console games have lost their way is down to economics. The power in the machines and the marketing from the manufacturers gives precedence to the OTT cinema tics and celebrity voiceovers, never mind the game play. The developers then get into a frenzy trying to outdo each other. Games take longer and cost more to develop, with blockbuster movie sized budgets and marketing campaigns to match. It’s what a game looks like in the cinema that counts now, not what it plays like to you and me. My hunch is the developers can’t stand it either. They should throw their frag grenades out the pram and rebel.

You might get rusty and need a little refresher, but it shouldn’t ever get to the point where you literally can’t remember how to do it.

Tried writing anything long hand recently? I have, and it was not a pleasant experience.

My mother put me on a touch typing course when I was about fifteen I think. They put little coloured freezer sitckers over the letters on the keyboard of an Olivetti electric typewriter and a reference card that slotted in to the print wheel. The idea was that you moved your fingers as little as possible and never looked at the keyboard.

Even as I type this I realise how deeply I absorbed the technique. I can easily type whole paragraphs with my eyes closed and make no more mistakes than I would with my eyes open. Better still, I type at the same speed that I think or talk. Typing on a real keypad is comfortable and accurate.

Technology marches on and virtual  keypads are upon us, but for the touch typist they are a form of torture.

Touchtyping relies upon the fingertips feeling their way around the keyboard – because, if you are not using your eyes you need some way of knowing where you are. The edges of the keys, the slight indentations in the center, and the pressure as you make your mark are how you see the keyboard. A touchscreen subjects you to sensory deprivation. Your fingers see nothing. It’s hopeless.

Faced with the choice of the iPad or a piece of paper for taking notes last week, I gave up on the gadget and sharpened my pencil.

What I had to write down was not complex. It didn’t require 100 wpm or shorthand. Names, actions, comments, things to follow up on, some numbers. Nothing, really.

I couldn’t do it.

I couldn’t write an “s” after an “e” or a “b” anywhere near a vowel. The hand completely refused to do the bidding of the brain. The six year old me who had had this drilled into him by the English teacher yelled and howled in frustration. I found myself picking each letter out to write it properly, but even then certain syllables had me defeated. I began changing words in order to avoid “ain” and “lab”. It was a humiliation. The notes sit on my desk and tomorrow I have to type them up but I know already what will happen – the script will be illegible and I will rely almost entirely on my memory of events, jogged by what I think the script says.

This does matter. It’s easy to get carried away with technology and say that skills such as cursive script are simply redundant in the modern world, but I don’t buy that and anyway even if it were true, “out of use” and “of no value” are entirely different things. I want to learn how to hand write again. Hopefully, when I’m at the airport this week, with some time to kill, I’ll be able to buy a pad and a pencil, and start doing practice drills from 35 years ago.

I can’t wait until it’s over, even though it has not yet begun.

Football generally leaves me cold and this World Cup fever is a complete mystery.

So perhaps its because I am not party to this collective psychotic episode that I am finding the desperate attempts of the ad men to attach the world cup to every single thing they are trying to sell utterly befuddling.

Barclays Stockbrokers are offering their customers a deal where every trade costs just £4.42 (4-4-2, geddit?) so long as England are still in the competition. How great a deal is that? Not very. The standard rate is £6.95 per trade anyway. So about 1/3 off for a couple of weeks. If you are making trades so small that the commission makes a material difference you’re in the wrong game.

It’s impossible to buy a TV right now without being offered cash back for every goal England scores. Has anyone ever heard of Hoover’s misadventures with free flights to New York (or are they expecting England not to score many goals?). Definitely short Currys, Dixons and the other retailers if you can (indeed, Barclays will give you a good rate on the trade).

Not to be outdone the PR fluffers are out in force too. Top Prize for Lamest World Cup Promotion goes to Santander, the Spanish banking group which has a big presence in the UK High Street, for their “Don’t Get Curried Away At This World Cup” campaign. They made up/carried out some research which revealed that nearly 1 in 8 households have suffered stained carpets thanks to stuff being spilt whilst watching football. Terrifyingly 44% were permanent and required replacement upholstery or carpet. A normal person (i.e. not a PR person, as they are not normal) would conclude that the table is a better place to eat your curry. However, Santander think you should just make sure you have insurance. Colin Greenhill, head of Santander Insurance UK said: “I would advise people to try and not get too excited during the World Cup to avoid damaging their home furnishings, but I doubt anyone would listen. Instead, all I can suggest is that people make sure they have the peace of mind that their home insurance will cover them in case of an irreparable accident.”. I’m crying now.

Then there’s the “world cup widows” marketing blitz, as if (a) only women don’t give a shit about football and (b) not being interested in football is a form of depression from which you need a half price deal to stop you from jumping off the roof.

One chain of Chinese restaurants is offering half price meals if ordered during an England match.”Hate Football, Love Dim T” it says. Well what if I want to eat chinese food and watch a match on my iPhone at the same time with the free Wifi in the restaurant? Clearly there were no men involved in the meeting which came up with this idea.

The marketing brainstorm/thought shower/overlong meeting at Pizza Express must have gone on so long that they failed to choose between a promotion designed to attract football fans, and one to attract football widows, so they went for both. Footie fans get a brilliantly positioned “4 for 2″ pizza deal whilst the normal human beings get “2 for 1″. What genius! What originality! I nearly fell off my seat when I realised the sheer brilliance of this ruse. It’s the SAME offer. Give them an award, someone.

I hope we lose early.

Let me start with the disappointment.

There really isn’t enough packaging and what there is, doesn’t smell right.

I like my gadgets to smell of plastics, of polystyrene, of barely dried fixative, of Chinese factory worker dew. This one just smelt of cardboard.

The thing just sits there on top of the box, in the mandatory apple sticky cellophane fold over, on top of a rubbish little plastic tray. At least they have the decency to charge it up for you. I really hate that, when you take a new device out of the box and then the bastards give you an empty battery that has to be charged for half a day before you can get your hands on the goodies. What kind of sadist dreamt up that idea? I think he works at Nokia at the moment. Their batteries are always on the verge of going flat, even when they are charged. Scandinavian sadists.

Now look, if you’ve got an iPhone, there’s nothing in the whole turn-on-plug-in-set-up process for iPad which is going to be new to you. All these people who have done videos and guidebooks on how to set up your iPad, how to synch it, how to manage settings, they’re all just selling ad space. You can ignore it. This thing basically sets itself up. Plug it in to iTunes and synch. Don’t want your apps copied over? There’s a tickbox for that. It really isn’t hard. So let’s skip over this stage and just get down to using it.

So here’s where it gets odd. Using it. For what? There you are, with this thing, and you’ve probably never had a device like this in your hands before. It’s confusing. How do you hold it? How do you sit? What, actually, are you going to do first? Very strange experience.I’m not surprised so many people are perplexed by the iPad; they simply don’t know what to do with it. It makes you feel like an aborigine who has been given a record player.

Start with e-mail, I think, and you will quickly discover what Steve Jobs meant by the “magic”. Without the mouse to come between you and device, interacting directly with gestures, is a profoundly different experience. Theatre people (used to) talk about “the fourth wall”, an invisible wall that separated actors from audience, that requires you to suspend your disbelief in order to really get absorbed into the action on stage. That’s about as close to explaining what happens with the iPad and an application like email, or a word processor, or a lot of games. You’re now part of the machine, rather than controlling it from the outside.

And this, I think, is the essence of it.

Ironically one of the situations in which the fourth wall of computing doesn’t come down on the iPad is the web itself. Looking at a web page, your gestures just scroll and zoom. This is also true of reading books. It’s very passive. Actual typing and navigation don’t add much, and don’t take away the distance between you and what you’re doing. The web is built for keyboards and mice right now. I think though that as touch interfaces become more prevalent, you’ll start to see a whole new approach to the web which does allow you to break down the barriers.

One question has come up a lot in the last couple of days: what’s the point of it?

Our natural tendency is to categorise something like this as being “like” something else.This nearly always misses the point – and certainly does here.

iPad is not a small laptop, or a big phone. It’s not even a flatter, wider, PSP. It’s a new form of computer in the same way that a laptop was a new form.

The iPad addresses a potent weakness which has been holding back computers for years, without us noticing: the mouse. Let’s not forget that the mouse itself enabled the creation of graphical computing. It was revolutionary, and changed our world. But it’s not portable. Trackpads and nipples are dreadful compromises that just don’t work. Just look at those contortions you have to go through to do simple things with a trackpad whilst sitting down. I get cramp sometimes.

If you find this perplexing, I can highly recommend “The Evolution Of Useful Things” by Henry Petroski – one of the best books I have ever read for understanding the man made world around us. Design evolves, he says, as people try to compensate for failures or weaknesses in existing objects, but in so doing they create new weaknesses in other respects. The process is endless, and nothing is ever perfect.

Even the smallest banner ad consumes processor cycles faster than a shark eats plankton. Something to do with virtual machines and stuff which I hope never to be able to claim to understand.

And then I read some stuff about Flash on the iPhone and iPad. It isn’t there and, if Steve Jobs has his way, probably never will. Microsoft’s answer to iPad – the Courier – is also rumoured to be likely to ship without Flash, at least at the beginning.

I’m not interested in whether Flash lives or dies. I’m interested in what life will be like without it. I’ve just spent a day with Flash disabled on my computer.

It was weird. There really are all sorts of places which use Flash for menus, for advertising, even for basic interaction, without even bothering to offer an alternative, so ubiquitous is this technology. Consumers have become so used to it I bet that most internet users don’t even know what Flash is, or why they need it. It just comes with the browser.

No wonder that a lot of people are getting antsy about the absence of Flash from these new devices and hurling all kinds of abuse at the miscreants.

Switch it off and whole businesses which rely on Flash for their core technology will find themselves out in the cold. You can say goodbye to Moshi Monsters and Club Penguin (although I would be happy to say goodbye to them if I can wean my children away). They’ll be turning off the lights at Spotify and We7, for these darlings of web2 are entirely dependent upon Flash for their sites to work. It’ll be goodbye too to most online casinos who “no download” services rely entirely on Flash to exist.

Thousands, perhaps millions, of other sites which use Flash for little functional widgets will also find themselves on the wrong end of progress, with visitors unable to get off their home page, use their search, or even scroll down the page. Their site stats and revenues will take a dive – assuming, of course, that they are not using Flash for measuring traffic.

The fact is that most of these complaints are borne of nothing other than laziness.

There’s almost nothing you can do in Flash which you can’t do with browser based technologies such as CSS and Javascript. There are even fancy editors out there now (some free, by the way) which give you a nice environment to develop rich experiences in. And these will work not only on the new devices, but most of the old ones too. Flash, which created the possibility of a rich interface on a web page, has been outclassed by the very thing it sought to replace: HTML.

For sure, there are weaknesses to the new technologies. Flash is pretty good for your arcade style gaming, for enforcing DRM for media streaming, and for standardizing the visual experience across platforms. It’s probably quite good for rapid development, and scales well for things like Moshi Monsters. The new technologies are poor substitutes for Flash in this respect right now – but only right now. I remember when Flash first came out and it was also pretty clunky. Most developers laughed at it and carried on making Director movies on CD-ROM.

My point is that the internet is evolving fast – not just the software but the hardware too. And Flash simply got out-adapted.

Flash was superb when the no. 1 browser was IE5 and Javascript was something you used when you weren’t bright enough to use a real programming language. Even now, so many people use IE6 still, there’s a case for something which designers can use with confidence.

However, I think that Flash is at or near it’s Use By date. Even Microsoft doesn’t want you to use it any more, and IE8 is nearly (but not totally) happy running the new technologies.There is no need for plugins, memory usage is lower, and weaker devices can function just as well as stronger ones.

The tipping point will come, though, with iPad and the Courier. These devices will set the trend for user interface design and the building blocks of these interfaces, their very DNA, is not the vectors and tweening of Flash but the tags and scripting of Javascript, CSS and HTML5. The internet is evolving, and Flash is fast becoming the Neanderthals of web history.

First up, the box. It’s like a very expensive bottle of aftershave, or, well, anything expensive made by apple. But white.

There’s a worry here: what if Nexus One is really the “not-iPhone”. I’m hoping that it can rise above that. One day, too, perhaps Obama will go beyond being “not Bush”. We’ll see.

Like most men, I stopped reading instruction manuals at age six, and therefore I have immediately discarded the tip sheet on top of the box and decided to plough on regardless.

The Nexus One beats the iPhone in one respect straight away. It’s really lovely to hold. The back has a teflon surface which means you don’t feel like it’s about to shoot out of your hand like a wet bar of soap. The camera lens looks like a camera lens and the front of the phone has a very reassuring trackball on it – something for those opposable thumbs to use.

Quickly take the back off, see that the batter is missing. After digging it out of the box, I did check the instructions to see whether this is one of those “charge overnight” jobs: it is. Just as well I checked, but also notice that (ha ha) the instructions omit to mention putting a sim card in the phone before you power it up. There’s a nice squishy little phone cosy with the Android logo on it.

[short break for dinner whilst waiting for it to charge up]

The phone starts with a pleasing vibrate, taking a Nokia-type amount of time to boot up. There’s the obligatory vanity screen for the developers, who have watched too many movies and think they’re in Hollywood, after which I’m asked for my PIN (this is on my SIM)

Touch the android to begin, it says, complete with silly hand image just in case I couldn’t work out what that means. Apparently, being a moron, I need to be told how to use the on-screen keyboard and set up a google account. If you don’ mind, I shall skip this nonsense.

Next up: set up a google account. Or sign in. Must say I don’t care for the onscreen keyboard much. Buttons are too small and feedback is not good. As with all web processes ported to mobiles, this suffers from the fact that I set my password up when I had a nice, full size, qwerty keyboard in front of me. Not so much fun on a phone.

There’s an option to use google location facilities (what, do they have their own satellites now as well as power stations?) and backup.

We’re ready to go.

The default wallpaper has a Tron like animation effect. I can’t help but wonder if this another one of those single-finger salutes to the iPhone which, of course, was built by men and can only do one thing at a time. The iPhone is strangely inanimate compared to the Nexus, which is positively alive in your hand.

The phone first. Whatever you say about these devices, it’s important that they make good phones. The iPhone is not a good phone. Dialling a number is a fag, let alone finding someone in an address book if you are lucky enough to know more than about six people. This new Nexus has already (without fuss) grabbed my whole google address book and it’s wonderfully easy to access.

Home screen. Nice vertical scrolling with a roll down effect at the top and bottom of the page. The camera is awesome, really quick (unlike the iphone, which takes photos several seconds after you want them taken, and out of focus).

Finally, because it’s getting late, I open the browser. Here, subtly, is the really impressive little feature that I’ve been hoping for. Just under the Google Search button, is a little link with my location and “Near me now”. The iPhone needs to be told, asked, cajoled, app’d up, to remember that it’s a portable device rather than a small desktop computer. The Nexus knows it’s a phone and therefore likely to be out and about.

The Nexus One is, on first impression, all that the iPhone would want to be.

I remember when Apple first announced the iPhone, people like Nokia were very sniffy about a computer company making a phone. There was whining about the poor support for SMS, the rubbish camera, the weak phone interface itself. None of this seemed to matter. I think it will now that there is something to compare it to.

Nexus One (okay, Android 2 on a decent device) doesn’t just make up for the shortcomings of the iPhone; it shows what can be done when you take mobility seriously as an opportunity to create new services, new ways of living even.

Tonight, I can honestly say, I’ve seen the future of mobile devices, and it’s called Android. Can we change the world? Yes, we can.

Should Apple be worried? Probably not. Nokia, on the other hand, should be soiling their pants. All that cash they spent developing their own operating systems, mobile services and standards are about to go up in smoke. It can’t be long before they abandon this corporate hubris and adopt Android as their platform. If they don’t, I can’t see how the company will survive. All that fabulous hardware will be for nothing if consumers, developers and companies simply can’t use it.

Naive perhaps, but until today I really thought that UKIP was actually about independence, as in, UK Independence Party. Independent from what, though? Well, Europe, obviously – and everything which the headbangers of UKIP say comes with it. Such as 75% of our laws, apparently, a big chunk of our taxes, and foreigners working in the NHS. Golly.

But then I caught this fabulous video of Viscount Monckton getting biblical with some poor climate change schmuck in Copenhagen, all bulgy eyed and double breasted…

So it turns out that there are two salient points about Monckton.

First, he’s UKIP’s No. 1 Climate Change Sceptic and their spokesman on the issue.

Second, he recently defected from David Cameron’s Conservatives.

I don’t know why it took so long, but the penny dropped when I saw this video.

Here’s my theory: Monckton isn’t really a defector of conscience, but a plant. Cameron put him up to it, because next to UKIP taking the handrail on every fringe issue going, the Tory party looks even more electable every day.

The point of UKIP is to be the dustbin for the more rancid elements of the Conservative party, a political padded cell where they can throw themselves around as much as they like without doing anyone any real harm.

Some people are worried that UKIP could split the anti-Labour vote and let Labour in again or, worse still, create a hung parliament. These people probably work for Central Office too, and are sending out a warning to Tory voters not to take their flirtation with UKIP too seriously, just in case they catch something nasty.

The one I have however, is locked to the Three network. I’d like to take it with me to a new network and also, because I travel a lot, be able to put local SIMs in when I go abroad in order to save on call costs.

Mobile networks subsidise the purchase of new phones and claw back the cost over the contract term. SIM locking means the phone cannot be used on another network without their permission – in the form of a secret code you type into the mobile in order to remove the restriction.

Once upon a time, unlocking meant taking the phone to a half-unit on Tottenham Court Road where a man took it out the back, performed some voodoo, and hopefully returned with a working phone. I say hopefully because there were plenty of tales of this back street surgery going horribly wrong and leaving you with a totally inoperable piece of plastic.

It just seems safer to do it at home. And hey presto, there are websites out there who offer unlocking codes for pretty much any phone you can think of, for a few quid. Or so I thought.

First up, unlocksolution.co.uk. Google ad: “Instant Service. Order Online”. Perfect. I pay up, give them my phone’s serial number and hey presto they give me a LIST of places to go where I might be able to unlock the phone. This is not a solution, it is a “report”. It doesn’t actually give you anything you can use.

Turns out this scam is a popular one. Check the terms and conditions for a clause near the end that admits you won’t actually be getting an unlock code for your mobile. UnlockSearch.com says “unlock your phone today” and will send you a nicely formatted report about how this might be possible, or not, for just under £5. Ditto, Lock-Unlock.com. T&C Clause 12: “Unlock codes are not provided in the Unlock Reports.”

These sites were so similar, I wondered if they belonged to the same person. Our scamster in this case appears to be Izabela Galicka of  3 Brakinraney Manor Longwood, Co. Meath, in Ireland. This is the registered owner of Lock-Unlock.com UnlockSearch.com is the property of Vertisco Ltd 14525 SW Millikan #55662 Beaverton, OREGON 97005-2343 US. Unlocksolution.com is held by an agent (name.com) which is like a nominee account for shares – you never get to see who the real owner is. Same for unlocksolution.co.uk (although sadly their server is currently down) but they share the same address with other versions of the service with UK domains (unlock-city.co.uk), which is 145 – 157 St John St, London, EC1V 4PY. Very trendy. There’s a company in that building called Enable Internet Marketing. They claim to be in the online marketing business but their site is so dreadful it looks to me like a front. Who knows.

So here’s my theory. It doesn’t look as if there is one culprit here, but as there are quite a few sites operating from the exact same template, right down to the paypal ordering and format of the reports, I reckon it’s a franchise operation! Someone has developed the entire package and franchised or licensed it out to greedy people of weak morals around the world. Hats off to them, because there doesn’t seem to be anyone else doing it right now. I visited about a dozen unlocking places this weekend and they’re all in the same franchise.

There are, I should point out, sites that DO offer the unlocking codes. You can spot these because they use premium rate phonelines to exact payment and provide the code on the call. Sadly, they don’t work on the E71, but at least these are genuine services (or so I would hope, I can’t confirm this without having a phone to unlock).

The franchise scams are interesting in their own right, a perfectly novel business model for the internet – and one we’ll be seeing a lot more of I think. I also wonder if Appstores on mobiles are going to be a very fertile ground for this kind of thing. Caveat emptor, people, caveat emptor.

A suspicious text arrived on my work mobile at about ten this morning.

“Standby for details of a major gamble primed & running today. I’ll call you soon to relay this free info personally so keep your phone on. Paul Stewart Racing.”

No ordinary spam, this is professional stuff. For starters, the sender was “PSRacing”; the only way to persuade the phone to display text (rather than number) for a sender which is not in your mobile’s address book is to use a commercial bulk messaging service.

The call came about an hour later. I was in the barber’s chair. It flashed up as “private number” (i.e. whoever was calling did not want me to be able to trace them).

The man at the other end told me he had sent the text, and knew my name. Probably he had bought a list. He told me his profession is to set up horse races, and he has one going tonight. He’s an investor, and wanted to share a tip with me. I was told to write down the name of the horse, and then to watch what happened. In a moment of complete cowardice I said I wasn’t interested and hung up.

So here’s my theory about Paul Stewart. I can’t prove it because I bottled out, but all the signs are there. Paul probably doesn’t really set up races, or even fix races. This is a very hard thing to do, and risky. But he doesn’t need to, because I think he was trying to rope me into a classic of the 50/50 scam.

Here’s how it works. Something is going to happen – a horse race, a share price movement – for example. Our fraudster picks, say, 100 targets. He tells half of them that such and such a horse/share will win/go up, and the other half the complete opposite. If it’s a horse race, you can just divide the targets but the number of horses, and tell each group that horse X will win.

After the event, the fraudster discards all the targets for whom the prediction was wrong. Then, he subdivides the remaining punters again on the same basis and makes a further prediction.

No money will have changed hands yet. But after one or two more rounds of this game, the remaining targets will be thinking that this guy is a total genius, having pulled off the nearly impossible feat of a correct prediction several times running.

This is where the sting takes place. The fraudster gets you to part with cash for a bet/investment. Really good ones don’t ask for the money for themselves, but for a third party (bookmaker, stockbroker) who is of course in on the scam. The money, of course, goes up in smoke.

I don’t really care to know how this guy got my number, and my name – but I wish I hadn’t told him to go away. The 50/50 scam is really old school. It would have been fun to ride it a few more stops.

So I’ll start by asking people what’s most important for getting a business off the ground these days. From past experience I expect the answers to involve combinations of money, technology, more money, a business plan, and fluffy stuff like values, strategy and vision. £5 says noone, noone, mentions customers.

No business can survive without customers (although there are plenty of wannabe entrepreneurs who think so). It’s not quite a truism though. Some customers are dangerous. Some customers can kill a start up dead.

So recently I tried to buy a business which had good technology, some contracts with attractive looking customers, and good people. The deal didn’t come off, and a few months after I had a coffee with one of the senior managers there who had left as part of a restructuring shortly after the whole deal thing had happened.

I asked what had gone wrong and he told me the whole sorry tale. The business had been set up to provide mobile gambling games and had in fact scored a supply contract with a very big customer. They thought they’d hit the big time! It was like going for an audition for a band and finding out you’re suddenly the new member of Take That. Don’t stop to pass go, move directly to global stardom.

Except of course, in the excitement of signing this big customer, they didn’t get any commitments from the other side to actually promote the product they were building for them. In fact, it’s even possible that the customer thought that this little startup would do the promotion.

Of course you know what happened next: the startup practically bankrupts itself to provide this customer with a product (which was fabulous, by the way) only to find that by the time it’s delivered, the customer has lost interest. The product languishes deep in their website, no revenue is generated, and the startup is finished.

It takes a sackful of courage to turn down a gem of a deal like this. Worse, such deals rarely arrive unbidden – someone (an investor, a director) will have introduced it. Plus, how do you know if the big customer really will let you down like this? After all, Microsoft was once a start up whose big customer was IBM.

There are some danger signals to look out for. Sometimes the Big Customer will try to take advantage and demand conditions (such as share options) and refuse protections (such as exclusivity, minimum guarantees) that would result in your risk being increased. If you say no, and they walk away, my experience is that you haven’t really lost anything except a massacre.

The best advice is to ask yourself, before you sign, what would happen if the customer walked away, or did the bare minimum and left you holding the baby. If you have a credible contingency plan (even if that plan is to fire everyone), then you’re safe. If not, then you’re crazy. Don’t do it.