Spotting this picture pop up in my Facebook feed, it was hard to resist following the link to the full story at The Poke, a collection of funny blogs, posts that bills itself as 'time well wasted'.

And it nicely follows on from my post a few weeks back about the folks at Flickr who I thought handled a fairly major server outage rather well.

I really hope that this isn't a fake. Or at least the deflty-handled response purported to be from the Director of Corporate Communications at St Andrews University, Niall Scott, who was asked to verify if notice which appeared on campus was legitimate.

Let's face it, it's a funny fake. And a po-faced official might have taken a dim view to a Freedom of Information request enquiring about the veracity of the notice. Mr Scott's response is a lesson in the art of a well-balance riposte of fact, humour and policy.

Taking into consideration the subject matter, there's so many ways this could've gone wrong and I wonder how long it took to knock out (pun very much intended) this response.

Well, played. Like I said, I really hope the response isn't a fake. The names check out and I've emailed Niall to double-check. In the meantime, here's a snippet of his response:

A strong clue that the notice is fake is the line “Please go home and masturbate if you are bored.” As a matter of policy, the University would never encourage students to go home during term time.

I understand that two copies of the notice were attached, with chewing gum, to doors of the male toilets in the University of St Andrews Main Library on or about the afternoon of Sunday November 13th 2011. The notices were removed by Library staff shortly afterwards.

Far from having a policy on masturbation or outlawing the practice, as the bogus notice alleged, the University encourages the study of it, academically at least. Among the titles in the University Library is “Solitary Sex : A Cultural History of Masturbation” by Thomas Walter Laqueur, pub Zone Books, New York, 2003.

Available from the short loan section, and as of 3 p.m. this afternoon, one copy still available to borrow.

The full response is available in the original blog post on The Poke. It's worth a read.

UPDATE: Just heard back from Niall at St Andrew's University who confirms that the incident is true, and his response is genuine. Top work.

via Andrew Fawcett-Wolff & Craig Cockburn.

RIP Steve Jobs. 

I saw the news in the early hours of yesterday morning (UK time), whilst I was sitting cross-legged on the bedroom floor trying to force conference badges through my (non-Apple) printer without much luck.

It was a rather surreal moment. We all knew he was ill, really ill, and judging by his last appearance, Steve Jobs, was fighting his illness, but it was proving to be a tough battle. Even so, the news was still unexpected and sheds light on the new Apple CEO's sombre performance at the iPhone launch the previous day.

It's very sad, for his family, and for the tech industry in general, but trying to get some perspective is difficult when every news outlet splashing the story across their front page, ticker and broadcasts. Predictably, social media went nuts. 

In this maelstrom of media, trying to get some perspective is tricky, but maybe the impact is similar to the feeling when John Lennon was shot in 1980. I was too young to have realised the impact of that event, but it turns out, I'm not the only one to draw this comparison.

People connected with John Lennon as an artist, with a visceral connection to his work. Can Steve Jobs really be held compared? My answer: yes. If anything, for this generation maybe more so.

His innovation at the cross-roads of technology and design has re-defined an industry. A phone without buttons, probably inconceivable pre-iPhone, is now the de-facto standard. I won't bang on the products as I don't consider myself an Apple fanboy, although others may disagree, especially if I ever did an audit of the products I own. 

Consider the revolutions (good or bad, you decide) - computing, telephony, music, tablets. An impressive legacy that has had massive impacts on both the creation and consumption of media.

There'll be lots written about Jobs...but in everything I really liked the post from Brian Lam, ex-editor of Gizmodo who was both friendly and locked horns with Jobs, when his blog covered a pre-release iPhone, lost by an Apple employee.

And for the inspiring side of Steve Jobs, his Stanford commencement speech: