This year, Sharp kept the same size, but made their bags inflatable. The result is that you had the same morons colliding with you everywhere, but at least it didn’t hurt your legs, arms, or body. And with that, I really mean crotch.

Plus, as a bonus, I was able to use them to lie down, take a siesta, and tan in the Berlin Messe gardens. Thank you Addy, you make the world go ’round. [More IFA 2008 Coverage]

From the Fortune profile on her earlier this year (the first ever):

Moreover, they say, she has helped Bill become more open, patient, and compassionate. “Bullshit!” he bellows. Nicer, perhaps? “No way!” he shouts, grinning because he knows it’s true. One thing he admits readily: Thanks to Melinda, he is easing comfortably into his new role. About the philanthropic work he says, “I don’t think it would be fun to do on my own, and I don’t think I’d do as much of it.”

An all-rounder, Melinda is the girl you remember from school who was top of her class, good at games, popular, and a volunteer. She rose through the ranks at Microsoft, ending up as general manager of information products, before marriage to Bill, and their three children. And now it’s all systems go for the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and the one-time backroom girl has had to step into the spotlight–not a position she relishes, but where she knows she needs to be in order for the charity fund to realise its full potential.

Would the couple’s foundation, expected to dish out around US$100 billion of goodness in its lifetime, have been created without her influence? Perhaps Bill would still be flogging software to the world and beyond, with Ballmer, his Sancho Panza, riding alongside him. Misunderstood, he might claim, just plain weird, we might whisper as his wealth took him further and further away from reality. Melinda had the foresight to see what an aggressive, capitalist lifestyle would do to their family life and steered him away from it. He, in his wisdom, did not fight it.

The way I see it, most rich, workaholic men tend to marry someone who fits into their lifestyle. Bill Gates, on the other hand, has married a woman who has made him fit into hers. When I read about how she handled him in the parking lot at Microsoft after he asked her out on a date, her ballsiness made me weep with laughter. (”That’s not nearly spontaneous enough for me. I don’t know. Call me up closer to the day.” He called her that night.)

Plans for a trampoline room and nonsense-strosity high-tech in his new-build Seattle home were coolly dismantled without even a squeak from her other half. Melinda is credited for making him more open, patient and compassionate. Last week I watched a BBC documentary about him as he prepared to step down from the day-to-day stuff of Microsoft. “As he has grown older, the ratio of shouting to non-shouting has decreased,” one of his employees said about him. “That’ll be the Melinda effect,” I thought.

She is credited for having brought in a whole host of powerful partners to the couple’s eponymous foundation–not for nothing is she known as a great team-builder. Rockefeller, Hewlett and the Dells are on board, as well as a couple of big pharma companies. Joel Klein, the man who took the government’s anti-trust fight to Microsoft a decade ago, is batting for them on the education front in New York. And then there’s the current world’s richest man, Warren Buffett, who has pledged all his billions to the cause. “I’m not sure,” he said, when asked if he would have done it without Melinda.

Personally, I hope that the Nobel committee does make Gates Nobel Laureate, because that will mean that he did manage to make a difference to the world. And all because she made a difference to him.

For fun: Fun? Fun is for losers. I like to make money. And white things that go “bleep” silently. You think I’m kidding? Well, fuck you, you virgin.

My job: In the words of one of my many imitators, “Dude, I invented the iPhone. And the iPod, the iMac, the MacBook, the Lisa… *continues ad infinitum*

Favourite hot spots: Hawaii, California, NYC, my meditation cushion.

Favorite things: Money, White things, iTunes, calligraphy, the kids, jeans, black turtleneck, Windows Vista (just kidding), Dylan, the Beatles, Coldplay, beards.

Last read: WSJ, FSJ, Gizmodo, The Art of War by Sun Tzu

About me and who I’m looking for: I’m the best. So if you want to be with me, you’d better be the best (although that place is already taken. By me). But the best in your class—as long as that class is Alpha. Impatient, I don’t suffer fools gladly. I fight to win, so that means I’m aggressive. I love blondes—like I said, there’s only room for one brunette in my life, and that’s me. And did I tell you I’m a genius?

For fun: Giving stuff away. Swim night with the kids, driving fast, Africa, oiled-up Graeco-Roman wrestling with Ballmer, oiled-up wrestling with anyone, actually.

My job: I am currently retired

My ethnicity: Binary

Favorite hot spots: Washington State, Harvard, Yale, my beautiful, throbbing brain.

Favourite things: Hoodies, money, research labs, books, science, long romantic walks on the beach discussing phosphates and malaria vaccines

Last read: “Steve Ballmer’s Day, 06.20.08″, a pamphlet by some guy I’ve got spying on my replacement, 1001 of the Best Binary Jokes Ever; balance sheets, The Bridges of Madison County.

About me and who I’m looking for: According to Brian Williams, I’m a “brilliant, powerful, let’s face it, sexy and good-looking leader of men and women.” As for what I’m looking for, well, basically, anyone who’s free five weeks from Tuesday, because I’ve got a window at 7.30pm.

Going back a quarter-century, Jobs was always sexy—as you can see from the hilarious clip below. It is Gates, however, who has come a long way. This vid proves that the Seattle-born brainbox was the ’80s equivalent to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, that is, not a natural-born sex bomb:

Let me leave you with an anecdote. About a year and a half ago, just after I’d started working here, I had a strange dream. In it, Blam was scheduled to interview Steve Jobs for Giz but, as the appointed hour approached, there was a change. “He wants you to do it,” Blam said, coming over to my imaginary desk in the open-plan office of my dream. “Me?” “Yeah,” said Blam, the hurt evident in his voice. “But I don’t know anything about him,” I bleated.
“I know that,” said my boss. You’ve got 30 minutes to prepare.”

In the event, though, the interview was an absolute disaster. There was me, a bunch of questions scrawled on my reporters’ pad, in the kitchen, making him a mug of tea, and Jobs, chasing me between kettle and cupboard, brushing off all attempts to give him a hard ride, instead asking me how I liked my men (answer: scrambled.) It was not the most successful of interviews—I was far too earnest and uptight, while he behaved like that randy old goat from the speeded-up bit of The Benny Hill Show. I woke up feeling both attracted to him, yet at the same time repelled.

I have yet to dream about Bill Gates.

With apologies to Melinda Gates and Laurene Powell Jobs.

During the two decades that I’ve had my components, I’ve run the gamut from vinyl to cassette and CD, and all the way back again. The black boxes are part of my life, they’ve stoked parties, soaked up miserable tears, impressing and depressing the menfolk in my life. I’ve sawed antique walnut cabinets to pieces in order to accommodate multi-plugs, connectors and dust covers and now all I rely on is a little white fag-packet-sized box that stores more music than I could ever hope to accumulate.

How many times have you bought the same album? I’ve got multiple formats for quite a few, but here’s a perfect example: I spent a year in France as a teenager and, having just a Walkman and portable speakers for company, bought myself Mlah by Les Negresses Vertes. A couple of years later, when I was deep into the house scene in Paris, and running a music fanzine, I persuaded their record label to give me the 12″ of Zobi La Mouche. Nice buggers that they are, they threw in the album on vinyl, too. A few years later, and I went to Madrid for the first time, I found the CD on special offer in a record store and, having only my laptop for company, snapped it up.

Several years—and moves—later, I get my first iPod. Easy peasy, I think, as I sit down with a pile of CDs to rip. Mlah? Meh. According to my laptop, the disc was unreadable. It was time to open up an iTunes account. Sleazy teasy record labels, more like. Call me a fool, but I’ve acquired Mlah FOUR TIMES OVER. How many more formats can the record companies come up with? Hologram disco MP3s? Dubbly sound that goes to Eleven? Free horse and cart when you purchase the high-quality, 4-swazillion-kbps version? Even the tracks I’ve ripped may already be obsolete. To quote Johnny Rotten, “Ever get the feeling you’ve been had?”

It’s Thursday afternoon and, as I lie on my bed and type this, one of the movers is transferring my clothes into one of those hanging boxes. I reckon I’ve got about 20 minutes to decide whether my boxed up Denon tape deck, Technics amp and turntable, NAD CD player and KEF speakers make into the van marked “Blighty.” It is, however, a bit of a no-brainer. How could I abandon those stalwarts of my life, passé though they may be, in favour of a simpler system whose audio quality isn’t exactly fabulous?

Perhaps the clincher, though, is that my iPod is currently filed under B for busticated. Into the van my components go, then. Whether they ever come out of their boxes again is another story.

The following objects are no-nos:
• Blogger, Orkut and Facebook The first of these surprises me, as Iran has the fourth largest community of bloggers in the world—even Ahmadinejad has one. (His latest entry reads “My package from Amazon arrived today—although it took its satanic time. Cancelled cabinet meeting and the Ayatollah and I hit the games room all morning. GTA IV FTW.” ) Anyone who wants to start one up has to inform the authorities, however.
• Celebrity magazines “Using photos of artists, especially foreign corrupt film stars, as instruments to arouse desire, publishing details about their decadent private lives, propagating medicines without authorisation, promoting superstitions,” goes the explanation.
• Boots and hats Only when worn by women, although I suspect that the Village People’s steel toe-caps and leather cap might not make it past the “Down With This Sort of Thing” crew.
• Neckties Although they’re not averse to slipping a length of rope around miscreants’ necks, I guess a skinny number with piano keys down the front is just taking it too far.
• Breasts on mannequins Some shop windows display clothes on showroom dummies with mastectomies that look like they’ve been done with an ax and covered with flesh-coloured duct tape. Yeah, lose that image from your brain now.
• Western music The artist worst hit is, apparently, Kenny G, so for that let me just say Viva la Revolución!

What, no gadgets banned? Wrong. camera phones are off limits. High-speed internet, too. The reckoning is that denying these items will allow citizens to remain in a state of moral purity. The state has even invested in US-built software that can scan images and files sent by phone to ensure that the morals of its citizens remain pure. And, in a way, they’ve got a point. Can you remember life before broadband? Yeah, it wasn’t pretty—half an hour to open a single hi-res image. Porn traditionalists who like basic missionary sex must have been dying as they strained to see what was going on below the protagonists’ expressions of ecstasy as the pic revealed itself, millimeter by agonising millimeter. Not quite the skin smorgasbord Westerners now enjoy.

Nuclear reactors aside, what does Iranian gadget freak get to play with? LG, apparently. The Korean electronics company is big in Iran, which gave it the green light last year to produce five mobile phone handsets in collaboration with an Iranian manufacturer. LG stuff is advertised all over the place. Switch on the (silicone-free) Iranian music channel and you’ll find the commercial breaks clogged up with plugs for LG’s RoboKing robotic vacuum cleaner.

Whoah there! So, Barbie is about to be sacked, but autonomous vacuum cleaners are totally fine? Mullahs! Ahmadinejad! Do you not realise what you are doing? Now, I’m no great defender of Barbie (as a kid, I read war comics, climbed trees and played Doctors & Nurses) but these robot vacuum cleaners may be more of a threat than the blonde, pneumatic doll. In the grand scheme of things, I would think Barbie is a more traditional symbol of womanhood than a robotic floor cleaner that does the drudgery of housework, freeing the ladies of the house to dream of getting jobs, drivers licenses and other sorts of trouble. Are you sure you’ve got the correct target?