New ethnic groups

Any major airport (particularly the sort of long haul airport where lots of people change planes) has a bar where people who find themselves stuck in the airport for a few hours (due to a change of plane or a refueling need for the plane they are on or similar) can spend the time drinking beer. When travelling from Europe to Australia I occasionally find myself in one of these bars. This one is the one on the roof of Singapore Changi international airport, which I visisted on the way through to Australia last week. This one is quite intriguing, because it is on the roof, and there is a small area costisting of a bar and cactus garden. (The two photos that follow were taken from approximately the same spot, but looking in opposite directions)





If you go for a drink in such a bar (as I tend to when in such airports) the sorts of people you meet tend to be thirty and forty something types who look like they have suffered from a bit of wear and tear. (This is of course at least partly jetlag. They no doubt look less so when they are relaxed and at home, wherever on planet earth that may be). They tend to be Anglophone, British and former dominions of the British empire types: English, Australians, New Zealanders, the odd South African, the very odd Canadian. (Not Americans, however). They tend to be the sorts of people who are doing okay but are not extremely prosperous, and who work at the type of profession for which the work is spread around the world and usually employs independent contractors rather than employees. (Now that I think about it, there is a lovely portrait of the type of person I am talking about in Neal Stephenson's 1996 Wired Essay Mother Earth Mother Board from 1996. He is talking about people laying undersea fibre optic cable, but the image is more general than that. In any event, such people seem to form an ethnic group of their own. The national origins become irrelevant (other than that general British Empire sort of type) and they all become relatively similar in the bar.

And the bars are very similar, whether you are in Tokyo, Singapore, Bangkok, or Manila, although in superficial terms they might have strange unique features such as cactus gardens. (They do vary a bit when you get outside Asia. The subculture I mentioned will still exist, but perhaps only in one corner of the bar). You find yourself stranded airside in such an airport, and you know that a familiar bar will be there somewhere, and you eventually do find it at the end of a dingy corridor, where you walk inside and you find the same expats as always. It will not be necessary to change your money first: the bar will take your sterling or Australian dollars, although they will frown on South African rand. You will sit down, and start a friendly chat with people next to you.

Other types of frequent travellers are not to be found in the bar. Actual employees who travel a lot are to be found in business and first class lounges in comfort, away from the hoi poloi. I used to (briefly) be one of that kind of person. I rather prefer the bar with the expats. Perhaps this is why I no longer am that kind of person.

These days, some airport terminals have a different kind of lure, which is a free internet cafe. If I have to waste two or three hours in a terminal, this can sometimes be a better way to make the time pass than can an expat bar. However, it depends on the circumstances. There is a particularly good free internet terminal in Tokyo Narita airport, even if the security requirements are irritating. There is one at Changi, but when I was there it only had four terminals, and two were out of order. This meant endless queueing for a short period on the internet, which made it possible to check e-mail, but no good for making time pass. To while the time when I was waiting, I did take a photo, but the lighting was weird, and my digital camera does not handle weird lighting very well.



While the bar would certainly have taken Australian dollars or sterling, as it happened I had spent all my sterling in the bar at Heathrow, and I didn't want to spend my Australian dollars because I still wanted to have some when I arrived in Melbourne, so I got 20 Singapore dollars (about A$20 or £8) out of a cash machine. I didn't spend all of them, because I thought it would be good to still have some when changing planes in Singapore on the way back, which I was intending to do.

As it happened, though, I have delayed my departure from Australia by four days and the only flight I could get back was via Tokyo. (I have a four hour layover in Tokyo in fact). It is quite possible (indeed likely) that the bar in Tokyo will take Singapore dollars, but it is not quite as certain. So I may have to keep the Singapore dollars in my wallet until next time I find myself in Singapore. But that will no doubt not be before too long.

And by coming back via Tokyo instead of the Sydney-Singapore-Frankfurt-London routing I was taking originally, I have lost the two days in Germany I was intending to reward myself with on the way back. Oh well. It is at least possible to buy draught Erdinger in London.

For those who are wondering

What I am presently doing in Australia is assisting my parents, who are moving house. My father has lived in the same house for more than 50 years, and my mother has lived there for nearly 40. It is a deeply strange and in some ways disturbing experience, because a lot of it involves sorting through childhood possessions, school books, university notes, and all sorts of relics of the first 20 years of my life, and figuring out just what to keep. Many of these things are things I would never look at again, but they have very distinct memories attached to them. It's very difficult, and at times quite painful.

Contact detail

I have just stuck an Australian SIM card in my mobile phone. If anyone wants to reach me during the next couple of weeks, I can be called or SMSed on +61 404640711

Redirection

I have a piece on the last stages of the UEFA Cup and the Champions League over at ubersportingpundit.

Beer blogging

I have tried the more famous green and red label Coopers before, but this is the first time I had tried the yellow.



I do enjoy a stout, and this one is indeed very good.

Redirection

I have a piece on Tim Blair's terrible secret over at Samizdata.

Redirection

I have a piece in which I basically just quote Bruce Schneier at length as to why ID cards will not make us safer over at The White Rose.

Take me to your lizard

One thing that is notable is how much more wildlife there is in Australia compared to England. Just in two day's in my Mum's backyard we had this



and this.



Hopefully we can get some snakes soon.

Redirection

I have a piece that ended up being about Brian Lara's triple century against England over at ubersportingpundit.

Stuff I didn't get around to posting before I left England

Southall is an Indian dominated district in West London. (If you have seen the film Bend it Like Beckham, much of the movie is set there). I am more familiar with the Indian dominated districts in South London, for instance the area around Tooting. However, while that are contains a lot of muslims as well as hindus, Southall contains fewer muslims and a lot of sikhs. Like Tooting, Southall is full of extraordinarily useful shops. For instance, there are none of those problems you sometimes run into when you need pooja accessories.



And although there are fewer muslims than in some areas, they are certainly not entirely absent.



And I don't know quite what to make of this extraordinary vehicle. It is parked outside a Tandoori house. In fact, the proprieter of the restaurant claims to have invented the word "tandoori" in the 1960s, and that is entirely possible. I believe it is possible to hire the vehicle for use as a party room or similar.



And the vehicle is a subcontinental model of bus, and does not satisfy British road standards and apparently cannot be registered in Britain. However, it is on the road, and it has Pakistani number plates. Presumably it was driven all the way from Pakistan.



How cool.

Mr Blair, pay attention

Non-Australians may be unaware that the city of Melbourne is an extremely Greek place. Australia received a large number of immigrants from Greece in the second half of the 20th century and for some reason most of them settled in Melbourne. (A factoid you hear in Australia is that Melbourne contains the second largest number of Greek people of any city in the world, after Athens. This may or may not actually be true).

In any event, the Greeks of Melbourne are on the whole good people, and one finds famous Australian footballers with names like Demetriou, and Greek restaurants that in the middle of Melbourne that are still open at four in the morning, something that was quite useful when I was there over the weekend. But of course despite being as Australian as can be, the Greeks are still Greek.



Clearly, there is a lot of anger amongst the Greeks of Melbourne. They want the Elgin Marbles back in Greece and they are not ashamed to say so (although for calling them the Elgin Marbles I will no doubt never be served breakfast in any of their restaurants again - which is a shame because the breakfast I had on Saturday was excellent). Tony Blair must surely be influenced by this. The power of Greek Orthodox Community Centres in Melbourne must surely be deferred to.

Redirection

I have a piece on the sad state of Zimbabwean cricket over at ubersportingpundit.

I am just awake

I have just been to the Melbourne blogger bash, with a (fairly) wide assortment of the Australian (and even to some extent other) bloggerati present. It is now 3.51am (although it is 6.51pm in London, so who knows quite what time my body thinks it is) and I am in an internet cafe with Scott Wickstein and his sister beside me. We are just getting through the night, as I have a plane to Sydney to catch at 7am. I would post some pictures, but my card reader is in our hotel. Therefore, they may have to wait until I am in Sydney. And, to tell the truth, a long sleep may precede the posting.

I'm in Australia

This morning, after I had arrived at Melbourne airport at 4.30am, fellow blogger Scott Wickstein was kind enough to meet me at the airport. A little later we found ourselves looking for somewhere to have breakfast in Melbourne. It was still very early, so we ended up at Melbourne's Crown Casino, which is open 24 hours. Scott was struck by the thought that it was Saturday afternoon in England, and that it might be possible to watch the Arsenal v Liverpool match in the casino's sports bar.

Therefore, Scott asked a member of the casino staff if the Arsenal Liverpool game was being shown. The response was

"Er, um, this is soccer?"

Toto, we are not in London any more.

Redirection

I have a little post at ubersportingpundit about the delightful use of the words "Arsenal" and "Chokers" in the same sentence that we are starting to see in the British media.

Posting from me will be light to nonexistent over the next couple of days. See you soon.

The perils of customer support

One problem of providing after sales support in the PC business is that the vast majority of people who ring you up to complain that "My PC doesn't work" aren't actually telling the objective truth. It may be true for them, but often it is what computer people sometimes refer to as PEBKAC (Problem exists between keyboard and chair). That is, there is nothing wrong with the computer, but the user is doing something wrong.

There also a reverse problem, which is that many people who work in support are not experts either. (If they were, they would have better jobs). In most instances I know at least as much as they do, so they are not of any great use to me. Therefore, I do not call support lines unless I utterly have to, and that generally means that there is genuinely a hardware fault, and I want the manufacturer of a computer to take it away and fix it.

Which is the case now. Dell's support lines were closed on the weekend, and the recorded message said to send them an e-mail, and I have been having an e-mail exchange. No problem. A helpful chap named S. Vishwanath initially sent me a list of "troubleshooting suggestions", designed to hopefully fix the problem if it was indeed PEBKAC. I knew that my problem was much more serious than anything that his suggestions would fix, but I went through them one by one to make him happy. I then really wanted to get the message across that I did no what I was talking about, so I used some jargon and even used the "I have a Ph.D. I know what I am talking about" defence, something I do not normally do. (In fact, I have no recollection of ever using it before). I even sent some photographs of the computer not working to demonstrate that I had done what he said, including one showing the computer plugged into an external monitor (and working), to show that it really was the display.





In any event, this was enough for Mr Vishwanath, so my laptop is being collected by Dell, and they are apparently going to give me a new LCD screen.

I can only assume that Mr Vishwanarth is in Bangalore or somewhere in India. Unlike many tech support people he appeared to know what he was doing. (Often, companies like Dell can hire better qualified and skilled people for this kind of job in India than the people who will do it in the west). His English had a slightly formal but stilted style to it. Although he obviously speaks English perfectly capably, it is also clearly not his first language. (It is also good that Dell assigned a single tech-support person to deal with my case until it was complete, and that he gave me his name as a matter of course. Companies that provide less good support are often very reluctant to volunteer the names of their employees that you are talking to).

I was also asked to remove "all removable parts, for instance the hard drive, the CD-ROM drive, and the battery and power adaptor" before sending the computer off. I removed the optical drive (actually a CD-RW/DVD-ROM combo), the hard drive, and the battery as requested. (Actually keeping the hard drive is good, because it means that all my important files are still in my possession). I wasn't quite sure how they defined "all removable parts". I suppose I could have also removed the (internal mini-PCI) wireless card and the RAM, but that seemed to be going a bit far.

And now I get to see how long it takes Dell to fix it. (I wonder where they will take it to fix it too? Will they do it somewhere in the UK, or will they take it back to the factory in Ireland where it was assembled?).

Redirection

I have a piece on the apparent end of the international career of Michael Bevan, one of the greatest players ever in one-day cricket (but an unsuccessful player at test cricket) over at ubersportingpundit.

Blogiversary

Today is the second anniversary of the first serious post on this blog. The true second anniversary of the first post of any kind, which was basically just a "Hello World" post, was on Saturday, but I was too busy swearing to remember.

Of course there is an explanation.

Despite having a fine, powerful, virtually new laptop, my eyes have been straying to slimmer, sexier and more expensive models. Clearly my existing laptop has noticed and has died of a broken heart (even if I did declare that I still loved it). So it is my fault.

Fuck. Fuck. Fuck

My laptop's screen has died. Rather than showing anything useful, it is showing a screen full of vertical lines of various colours. Thus I am unable to use my laptop right now. My old laptop has a perfectly good screen, but will only boot if the temperature / humidity / day of the week / phase of the moon / gravitational status of the universe is right, so it is highly questionable whether I will be able to use it. This means that I am rather lacking in computer resources right now, and blogging (and indeed almost everything else - we are far too dependent on our computers these days) will be highly variable until it is fixed.

As it is the weekend, Dell's telephone helpline is not operational. The recorded voice suggested that I send them an e-mail instead. Upon going to an internet cafe to send such an e-mail, their electronic support system insisted that I enter my "service code" - a set of letters and numbers attached to the bottom of the computer - before I would be allowed to send such an e-mail. I have the invoice for the purchase of the computer, which gives my customer number, my order number and my invoice number, but none of these are the number that Dell wants now.

I really could have done without this right now.

Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

Update: At least I am in good company. Laptops are wonderful things, but they can be finicky and temperamental. Desktops are more reliable. I actually have a motherboard in my possession with a CPU and 512Mb of RAM on it. I just need a screen, keyboard, case, power supply and hard drive (plus an operating system - do I want a Linux box?) to have a desktop machine. I must either buy or wrangle these parts so I have some backup. Actually if I even had a screen right now things would be better. My laptop has VGA out. (This is assuming I don't have to switch the external monitor output on while looking at the primary screen, in which case I remain completely screwed).

Can I add a "bugger" to the "fuck" I said already?

Further Update: My old laptop is alive. It's a bit slow, but I can at least get stuff done. Apologies for all the profanities, too.

Even further Update: No, actually my old laptop isn't alive. As I said, it is highly temperamental. I may get it to work at times over the next few days and I may not. Using a public terminal in a library right now.

Redirection

I have a piece on day two of the England v West Indies test over at ubersportingpundit.

Redirection

I have a piece on "voltage rustling" over at Samizdata.

Studies in nerdiness

Yesterday evening, I was in central London. I was expecting a call from a friend of mine, who I was planning on meeting with for coffee. As it happened, she called me just as I was walking through Soho Square. She asked me where I was, and I said that I was in Soho Square. As it was a beautiful spring evening, she suggested that we in fact get take away coffees, and drink them while sitting on the grass of Soho square. As I was waiting for her to arrive, I made a quick run to Oxford Street, where I purchased a couple of take away lattes and went back to the square. I sat down, and as I was waiting I got my laptop out and looked for WiFi coverage.

There was a wireless network with the SSID "Base Station". This is always a good sign. If wireless network has a name like "Base Station" or "Default" or the name of a manufacturer like "eTec" or "Belkin demo" or something like that, there is a good change that the owner is using the access point with its default settings, which means that security is likely turned off any anyone can connect to it. (Whether or not they intend to allow anyone to connect to it, I have no idea. In some instances it is no doubt deliberate, and in some instances it isn't). In any event, I had a perfectly good internet connection in the middle of Soho Square. This is perhaps not surprising given that Soho Square is about ground zero in the British media universe. Lots of people are using all sorts of technology in the area. But it was still kind of surreal. (LCD screens do not do especially well in environments that are bright and/or have lots of scattered light. Bring on OLEDs. But I digress).

My friend arrived, and we sat down and had our coffee and surfed the net for a little bit. It was kind of surreal. The Dell Inspiron 8600 is a little big and clunky, and I quickly looked up the Sony TR2 and showed her how cool that would be. Then for some reason the conversation got round to iPod accessories and then the car she wanted to buy, in the way that subjects which you talk about and browse do change. In any event, we had a very pleasant evening before going our own ways. She told me that she had had a fun evening, and that she would remember the time she sat in Soho Square and surfed the net with me.

Actually, I doubt it. We are in a transitional period with respect to communications. I think it is unlikely that we will be telling our grandchildren about this, other than in the context of "Thinks were once so primitive that this was a novelty". It isn't going to be long before every electronic device that we own is going to automatically connect to global communications networks as a matter of course.

But it is fun for now.

Update:

Redirection

I have some photos of the world's first railway station over at Transport Blog, and a rather funny correction from The Australian over at Samizdata.

Redirection

I have a piece giving an overview of the recently completed test series between Australia and Sri Lanka over at ubersportingpundit.

The best thing about becoming a libertarian......

is that you can abandon the left without having to embrace the right.

Of course, people on the left generally think you have embraced the right, and people on the right think you are still on the left. (I was actually getting this dual reaction for several years before I figured out precisely what it meant).

And did I mention?

The Grey Album is fantastic.

The machine stops

I am in a comfy chair in a Starbucks in Oxford Street in London. My laptop is plugged into a power outlet that Starbucks have conveniently provided near many of the tables and chairs. Although Starbucks have ridiculous overpriced wireless internet access, there is internet access from some other source nearby allowing me to connect for free, so this doesn't appear to be an obstacle. I have a nice cup of coffee, my laptop has my entire music collection on its hard disk, it has an inbuilt DVD player and a high resolution wide screen allowing me to watch movies if I want to. I have a mobile phone in my pocket.

I have tremendous entertainment options, I am fully connected to the global communications network. I have just been chatting in real time with a friend in Australia. I do have an expensive piece of hardware on my lap, but (apart from the cost of the odd cup of coffee) the total ongoing charge for this connectedness is zero. At least it is until I start using my telephone. Before too long, our telephones will no doubt be automatically patched into the internet data service on such occasions to save money, but we are not quite there yet.

However, the technology is simply mindblowing. Compared to the unconnected world we had when I was fifteen, it simply blows the mind.

I suspect the next step is for me to remain plugged into the global communications network when I get up and walk down the street. In practice, I think that what needs to happen is for my laptop to then reverse the situation from when I am stationary. The laptop needs to patch into the telephone, and get its connectivity via cellular networks. Of course, this is going to cost in a way that statying stationary isn't going to cost. That said, flat charges of at most tens of dollars a month for this are not far off. And as for entertainment, the full music collection when working down the street option is with us already. I just need an iPod. And I am not quite sure that I want to watch movies as I walk down the street. Still, there are probably semi-transparent video shades coming.

Obligatory cheese posting

Regular readers of this blog will know that I enjoy a good cheese platter, and I usually have a selection of cheeses in the house for emergencies. This evening, I went to get myself some cheese and crackers as a late snack. I had three. Firstly, a decent sized block of ordinary but tasty and good quality mature cheddar from Tescos, which is what I use for my bulk cheese needs, but which none the less is fine on a water cricket. Secondly, a smaller piece of oak smoked cheddar from the splendid Sainsbury's in Pimlico. Thirdly, a piece of Parmigiano-Reggiano, purchased mainly for grating and serving with pasta, but once again a small slice of this on a cracker is very pleasant.

However, all three are hard cheeses. Nothing wrong with that, but when I started to contemplate this, I came to the realisation that hard cheeses on their own aren't nearly as good as a mixture of hard and soft. I normally have some brie, or some Danish blue, or some gorgonzola, or some camembert, or some dolcelatte, or something like that. And today I missed it.

Of course, it is all the fault of that big Sainsbury's for not having any of that stupendously good unpasteurised brie that they often do have. This led me to buy a piece of another hard cheese, and sent my cheese balance completely out of whack.

Update: I meant "water cracker". What is it with me and cricket, anyway?

A question

I have the opportunity to spend a day or two in Frankfurt next month. Does anyone know anything interesting to do in or near Frankfurt? (Yes, I have "drink beer" on the list, but that is about all so far). I've been to the airport lots of times before, but have never left it and somehow think I should. I also have the opportunity to visit Singapore briefly, which I think may well be the Frankfurt of South East Asia (except with better food, worse beer, and the death penalty) but I have been there before and don't feel any tremendous urge to go there again right now, although there is a new railway line that I would like to look at).

The march of technology

I was in a computer shop in Tottenham Court Road the other day, and I was just looking at laptops. A salesman asked if he could help me, but I said I was just having a browse. His immediate response was "The Sony TR2 is over there". So presumably this is the number one item of interest for computer store browsers at the moment. (At least it was in this shop, which was not in any way Apple focused). And it is awfully nice. That's a spectacularly good machine given the size and weight. If I were backpacking around the world and I wanted to have computer with me (as these days I think I would) this is the one I would want. It's very small, but it is a full function, powerful, no compromises machine - except perhaps for a little CPU speed, although a 1.0MHz Pentium M is still pretty good.

Or I could go back to Apple, as many people seem to be doing. The 12 inch iBooks and Powerbooks are awfully cute, although not quite as small as the Sony.

And what am I doing talking about such things anyway? My present laptop is three months old, and I love it. I am not getting a new one for at least a couple of years. But my eyes seem to be straying.

The modern world

In 1992, I was in Poland at a moment when Australia were playing Sri Lanka at cricket at the Sinhalese Sports Club ground in Colombo. In order to find out the winner of the match (Australia, thanks to the efforts of a then unknown spin bowler named Shane Warne) I had to buy a day old copy of the Sunday Times, for which I paid the equivalent of something like £5. (I had access to the internet for work at the time, but it was good mainly for sending e-mail to other geeks. The idea that I would ever have access to it while on holiday was not yet reasonable).

As it happens, Australia are playing Sri Lanka at the same ground again right now. I am in London, but if I were in Warsaw I could find out the score over the internet at an internet cafe, or if I had my laptop with me I could connect to the intenet and find out the score via a WiFi hotspot. Or I could get someone to SMS me the score on my mobile phone. Certainly there are now few places in the world where I cannot find out the score of an international cricket match almost instantly.

As an example, I suppose, over the last couple of weeks I have been getting cricket scores off a British server for matches being played in Sri Lanka and SMSing the scores to someone in Adelaide, who is unable to access score directly when at work. And I have been able to provide him with this ad hoc global electronic scoring system quite literally without having to get out of bed.

Interesting

I was browsing Aint it Cool News, and I was reading an article on some new long overdue DVD releases of Hayao Miyazaki's animinated films. As I did so, I had iTunes on "shuffle" (ie it was playing songs from my music collection at random) and it somehow came up with the song "Castles in the Sky" by Sarina Paris. There must be an omen in that.

Great moments in globalisation

Booking short haul plane tickets is these days very easy. You just look the fares up on the internet, type in your credit card number, and bingo, you have a booking.

However, long haul and multi-stop tickets are enormously difficult to book over the internet. Either you end up being quoted the laughable "full fare" which nobody ever actually pays, or the online booking systems are not sophisticated enough to handle stopover, open jaws, round the world tickets, and all the other funny little details that occur if you are travelling a long way. So normally you have to deal with a travel agent or you have to ring up the airline directly. (What I would like is a proper over the internet interface to the booking systems used by actual travel agents. Yes, I am sure it is complicated. Yes, I can figure out how it works. Let me do it.

Travel agents are fine when you get someone who knows what they are talking about. (I had a particularly good travel agent when I lived in Sydney. He worked for a "student" travel agency, which was actually good, as students are often the people most likely to want a round the world seven airline counterclockwise itinerary with twenty seven stops that doesn't cost any more than a simple return, and frequently having to book such things trains good travel agents). However, when as a customer I find myself explaining to my travel agent just precisely which airlines fly where, what approximate fares should exist, and so such. Given that I am the one paying them, this is irritating.

All that said, some airline websites are better than others. British Airways have one which is surprisingly good and allows me to book more complicated itineraries at good prices than do most, but still not close to the full range of all fares and itinteraries that are possible on the airline. Their partner Qantas has a relatively useless website which cannot give me what I want. The complication comes from the fact that if I book the same flight through Qantas I get rather more frequent flier miles than if I book it through British airways. Therefore, it is necessary for me to actually call Qantas to make the booking. Okay?

However, I made the mistake of ringing up Qantas in the evening, after their British sales desk had closed. (I didn't ring them up especially late - it's just that their British office closes at about six. Their telephone system announced that it was forwarding me to a sales office in Australia, and that I would not pay extra for the call. Fine. But I wonder precisely why they did this, given that the person at the other end of the phone was entirely unable to help me with obtaining the best fare from London. One would think that if they can globalise their telephone system they can also globalise their booking system. But no.

Not much to say here, other than "Qantas".

A retailing puzzle

Normally, when dealing with different retailers that operate in the same sector of the retail business, it is obvious which are better run. For instance, there are three major chains of Starbucks clone in the UK: Coffee Republic, Caffe Nero, and Costa Coffee. (I will exclude discussing Starbucks themselves here. Their rules are different, as they have a parent company with deep pockets). A couple of years ago all three had similar numbers of stores, but I found quickly that my preference was for Caffe Nero. Their prices were a little cheaper, their coffee was better, and somehow they just understood the little details of their business better than their competition. This made going there for a coffee simpy more comfortable, and in this particular business, comfort is everything. More than anything else what they are selling is a comfortable place to sit down.

And this has been reflected in subsequent events. Caffe Nero have since outperformed their competition in terms of profitability, they have gone on an expansion boom and have opened lots of new stores, and their stock price has gone through the roof. Coffee Republic have gone down the tubes, and Costa Coffee (who aren't quite in the same business, for reasons that are too lengthy to explain right here) have stood still. (Starbucks have also been expanding rapidly).

And this is fairly normal. Well run businesses have a certain vibe about them. Usually I can just feel it. (A few years back, it was clear from the vibe that Woolworths in Australia was a better run supermarket business than Coles, and this eventually filtered its way through to the stock price, too). But there is an odd exception, which is supermarkets in the UK.

Tesco have long been a stockmarket darling, and have expanded massively and rapidly due to their superb understanding of the market, and their superbly designed computer systems and logistics. Their competitor Sainsbury's have done far less well at these types of things, and are thus in decline.

At least , that is the conventional view held by most market analysts, and that is the view reflected in the stock prices of the two companies. However, I find counter-intuitive, because I like shopping in Sainsbury's more than I do in Tesco. Sainsbury's shops seem better designed and the goods better arranged. And they are full of all manner of really yummy things that I don't find in Tescos.

As it happened, after having a coffee with Brian Micklethwait in the new Pimlico Caffe Nero (once again, I think the market is right on that one) I popped into the new big Sainsbury's in Pimlico, and as is always the case when I go into that Sainsbury's, I found myself coming out with bags of groceries: in this case a freshly made pizza, a piece of smoked cheddar cheese (although they did not have the unpasteurised brie that I have bought there in the past today) and a few other things. This is a really nice supermarket, and I find it hard to believe that the parent company is in decline. Some would say that Tesco wins in computers, logistics and supply chains rather than store design, but I am not so sure. Stocking a supermarket as well as this one is stocked requires good logistics and supply chains.

But that is conventional wisdom. Perhaps there will be a shift back to Sainsbury's and my intuition is right. Or perhaps I just have weird tastes in groceries.

A question

Does anybody know what the city is that is pictured in the British Airways advertisement? Although I don't think I have been there, it looks kind of familiar. Perhaps I have seen it in a movie or something.

Redirection

I have a piece on the on field pecking order in test cricket today over at ubersportingpundit.

Business Methods

When I purchased my computer, it came with a "90 day free trial" version of Norton Anti-virus (these days owned by Symantec). This whirred away regularly for three months, telling me that it was finding and deleting lots of viruses in my e-mail. A few days ago the subscription expired, meaning that the software still works but that it no longer updates itself for new viruses. Given that the virus situation is bad, shall we say, and given that if I get infected my computer will then start spewing crap to all my friends and I would rather not do this, I just bought a subscription giving me another twelve months of updates. This wasn't especially expensive - costing about the cost of a nice lunch I suppose - but Symantec will no doubt be pleased that I am a paying customer. Which is of course fine, and indeed good. They provide me with a useful service and I pay for it. God bless capitalism. (Although the authors of the actual viruses can go fuck themselves).

What interests me though is the nature of the financial relationship between Dell and Symantec. Dell install the software on their computers, and it is beneficial to them to advertise the computer as having anti-virus software installed. (Most people do actually need it). So Dell are getting some benefits. However, Symantec get paying customers through the relationship - for instance me. (Paying customers who are paying rather less than customers who simply buy the anti-virus software cold, however). So what is the net money flow between the two companies? Are Symantec actually paying Dell to install Symantec's commercial software on Dell's computers? Or is it one of those neutral situations where no money changes hands? Or is Dell paying Symantec for the software? (I really doubt this). Or do Symantec pay a commission to Dell when someone like me becomes a paying customer? (I rather doubt this, as when I registered with Symantec the registration process was surprisingly low tech and I was not required to provide enough information for them to identify my computer as a Dell, although I suppose they could find this out some other way easily enough if they wanted to.

Redirection

I have a piece on watching India play Pakistan in an Australian theme bar in south London, and what this says about the state of English cricket, over at Samizdata.

I am sad

Ahhhh. This is so cute.

(Link via Slashdot).

Update: There is another picture of it here if you scroll down towards the bottom, which gives you an idea of just how small it is. Clearly we are talking one of the hits of Cebit.

Further Update: The other thing is striking (but in no way surprising) is that this motherboard borrows a few things from laptops. The first thing you ask is "Where does the memory go?", but of course the memory slot is of the kind that takes the SO-DIMM modules that are commonly used in laptops. And the first reaction I had when looking at it was "Nice, but it doesn't have any PCI slots". In fact it has one, but it is one that uses the mini-PCI connector, that is also something that you see mainly on laptops. Not all laptops have them - but more and more do. Mine does (and the slot is filled with a wireless card) as do a lot of Toshibas. Hopefully as they become more and more common there will be more and more cards made for them.

Redirection

I have a piece on Australia's second test victory, Shane Warne, and the world test wicket taking record over at Samizdata.

Itunes has changed my life.

No real point. It just has. I thought I would share that with you. If someone would explain to me how to get my iTunes "recently played" list to appear on my sidebar as it does for the Yuppies of Zion, I would be delighted to share my dreadful taste in music with you, too.

The modern world

Well, if you are a famous science fiction writer and you hold an open house party during a major media festival and you invite all your fans and friends via the internet, this is what happens. People drink all the lychee brandy.

Update: The culprit has been found.

Redirection

I have a strange little observation on the timing of the Australian centuries in the second test against Sri Lanka over at ubersportingpundit.

Thoughts on Spain and terrorism

This started out as an addition to the comments thread of the previous post. It was too long for my comments system so I turned it into a post.

The thing that has worried me the most over the last year is that there would be a major terrorist attack in Europe, that large swathes of the population would conclude that the attack had been provoked by the war on terrorism, and that the response would be for Europe to feel the blow and then cower in its shell and essentially let the Islamicists win. (What do you do then? Allow them to have as many cells in your country as they like?) This seems to have happened in Spain over the last week. (And Romano Prodi's remark that "It is clear that using force is not the answer to resolving the conflict with terrorists" is one of the most appalling things I have ever heard). However, the whole ETA or not business really did muddle things. I think certainly the Aznar government lost at least some votes because it was seen as trying to spin the terrorist incident in a direction that was to its advantage rather than to seek the truth. (I don't think this accusation is especially fair - there may have been a little denial, but I don't think there was any genuine attempt to hide anything. The PP did announce that Morroccans had been arrested - it was not a leak. And it did this before the election).

(Interesting though that implicit in this interpretation is the clear message that dealing with ETA with force was right, but dealing with Al Qaeda was wrong).

However, certainly a fair bit of the political shift was exactly the "surrender to bin Laden and perhaps he won't hurt us any more" response that a log of the blogosphere has declared it to be. And Al Qaeda will read it as such. And I find it hard to imagine they will not try something similar later in the year. Their attacks since September 11 have been on places with key grievances in Muslim history (Indonesia, Turkey, Spain, Israel, as well as places actually in the Muslim world). Australia would be peripheral to that, but it does have an election in the second half of the year (or conceivably early 2005, but most likely late this year) that could be targeted in the same way. And of course there is the American election. Thankfully, it is unimaginable that America would respond to a terrorist attack in the same way that Spain has. America is arguing more about how real the threat is than the wisdom of responding to terrorism with force. If the threat was shown to be real in this way, America would respond by re-electing President Bush and giving him increased resources to resume the war. And we may be thankful for this. As for Australia, I do not know where it stands. However ghastly the Australian left is, the country would not be as limp wristed as Spain. Australians know they are on the edge of an unstable region of the world and are surrounded by Muslims, and they have recently been expanding their military and attampting to minimise the danger in failed states nearby. (That's what the peacekeeping troops in the Solomon Islands are about). I think there is a very real chance that Australia would respond to the terrorist threat by re-electing its present government and relatively little changing. The left would scream a lot, but in Australia it doesn't represent as large a portion of the population as it thinks it does, which is why Australia elects fundamentally conservative governments most of the time. The situation is similar to that in the US I think. If the election is fought on domestic issues, the incumbent will probably lose. But if it is fought on foreign policy, it will win.

And as to what would happen in Britain if an attack occurred here, I do not know. (There are lots of people in middle England whose response would be to fight, but I doubt that the ruling class in the Labour party (Blair excepted) is amongst them. But horribly, I think we may find out).

At times I don't feel especially safe in this world any more

Spanish police now claim to have the names of the bombers who violated Madrid last week - they are all Moroccans. An Algerian has also been detained in Donostia/San Sebastian in the Basque country in connection with the bombings. I don't know what he was doing there - I think that I would prefer it if there was not an ETA connection, however contemptible ETA are. Yes, as has been becoming more and more obvious for the last three or four days, it was an attack from Al Qaeda or someone connected with them. One wonders where the next terrorist attack will be. I doubt London is especially safe, but on the other hand it's an election year in Australia, and Australia could well be a target too. (On the other hand, it lacks the same "The Andalusian catastrophe must not be repeated" rant quality of Spain).

Redirection

I have a couple of photos of a Japanese television showing a Rugby World Cup semi-final over at ubersportingpundit.

A sign of the times, I guess

I am still not sure I believe this, but some cretins in local government in California actually apparently fell for the famous Dihydrogen monoxide warnings. Remember, DHMO is a major component of acid rain.

(Link via Glenn).

An odd mistake

This primer from the Washington Post gives a reasonable breakdown of the ethnic situation in Spain, and who ETA are, but it makes a curious mistake

The Basque people, believed by scholars to be of Celtic origin, have inhabited the stunningly beautiful regions of northeast Spain and southern France for centuries. They speak their own language, celebrate their own holidays and have their own traditions, which included fierce resistance to the autocratic regime of dictator Francisco Franco.

Yes, to all that except for the "believed by sholars to be of Celtic origin", which is completely wrong. Yes, there were Celts in Spain before the Romans got there and the Celts are all gone. However, the Basques were there well before that, and all the evidence suggests that they were there a long time before that. (Just how long a time is hard to say). Linguistically (and in some ways genetically, although there has been more mixing in this regard) the Basques are a complete outlier. They are not related to anyone that we can find. Some people have argued that they may havve been related to the Etruscans of Italy, but since the Etruscans have all been dead for thousands of years it is hard to tell.

Gratuitous beer photograph

The Belgians do know how to treat a bottle of beer with proper respect.



Update:



Yes, I know I am drinking a Belgian beer from a German glass. Death is indeed too good for me.

Redirection

I have a piece on Australia's victory in the first test against Sri Lanka and on the superb bowling of Shane Warne over at ubersportingpundit.

Redirection

I have a piece on a brief visit to the Spanish embassy over at Samizdata.

Redirection

I have a short piece on a USB Swiss Army Knife over at Samizdata.

Odd search request of the day

You do realise that doing this will send you directly to hell?

Really obvious advice of the day

Don't look up the current price for the same configuration of a computer that you bought three months ago, because it will be cheaper. Computers are just like that. (No it isn't horrendously cheaper, but about 10% so. Of course, I really needed the new machine three months ago). And of course there is a new fancy model as well, although that one is a fast Pentium 4 machine rather than the Centrino model I have, and while considerably faster it is probably less good for running from batteries a lot. It's heavier too. It's got more USB ports and a DVI port though - not that I have anything to connect it to from a DVI port.

Redirection

I have a piece on watching Manchester United get eliminated from the Champions League by Porto over at ubersportingpundit.

An interesting thought

Brian Micklethwait made some observations on why he thinks it is a bit silly to have a passenger wheel inside a circular hole in the World Financial Center being built in Shanghai. Given that the point of such wheels is to get you higher than you could get without them, I have to agree. (The future skyline of Shanghai looks cool though. I must go some time. The North Bund Tower looks like something out of the Thunderbirds).

This caused me to browse Skyscraper Page a little. I ended up at this picture of the tallest destroyed buildings. The largest buildings in the picture by far are of course the two World Trade Center towers that stood in New York, but on the very right of the picture we have the Great Lighthouse of Alexandria. The combination is poignant somehow, but I will not try to draw a message of any kind from it.

Redirection

I have a post on the politics of international soccer and the game that Wollongong Wolves did not play against Deportivo la Coruna over at ubersportingpundit.

Mmmmm. Interesting

You're Ender's Game!

by Orson Scott Card

To you, most everything is a game. It's summertime, and the living's
easy. Even when there's a war on, it's just a game to you. But even though you've
historically been able to meet every challenge, there are some doubts about what lies
ahead. Are you sure you're up to the next test? Don't forget to pay attention to your
siblings.


Take the Book Quiz
at the Blue Pyramid.

Movies

I saw 21 Grams this morning. Good, but I have one or two thoughts on it. And I think I may go out for an ale first.

Redirection

I have a piece on the cricket team of the United States of America's glorious qualification for the ICC Champions Trophy at ubersportingpundit and a silly photo over at Samizdata.

Update: Ubersportingpundit is down, but Scott promises it will be back in a day or two. As the Australian cricket team is playing a test starting tomorrow morning, I may cover it here for a couple of days until uber is back.

Redirection

I have a piece on Samizdata commemorating the fact that today is the tenth anniversary of the first spam. (Yes, really).

Update: I also have a little travel blogging about a trip to Kenya I made in 1993.

A fun blog

I will say I have to find the 31st of January entry for this blog to be just sidesplittingly funny.

I am not a fan of Bill Gates

My laptop is a widescreen model. As I have discovered that I like to watch DVDs on it in public places, this is good. Most movies are made in an aspect ratio of 1.85:1, although a substantial proportion are also made in 2.35:1. Widescreen televisions normally have an aspect ratio of 16:9 (1.78:1) which is close enough to be largely indistinguishable for most viewers, although either a small amount must be chopped off at the sides or the top and bottom must be cropped slightly less than is the case in the cinema.

However, widescreen computer screens such as mine usually use an aspect ratio of 16:10 (1.60:1). This means that there will be always be (very) narrow black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. This was a necessary compromise for laptop computers in particular, as a 16:9 screen is a little too awkward for computer applications.

Once you have a DVD player in your computer, it is necessary to get some software to actually play DVDs. There are a variety of solutions. I presently have four installed on my laptop: Cyberlink PowerDVD, Dell Media Experience (which I think is running using the same engine as PowerDVD), Interactual Player, and Microsoft Windows Media Player. The first three of these have no trouble realising that I have a wide screen, and when set to "full screen" they adjust to the full width of the screen. Windows Media Player seems incapable of realising this, however, and it for some reason assumes that I have a UGA (1600x1200) screen rather than the WUGA (1920x1200) screen that I in fact have. Therefore, with Media Player the whole picture is scaled significantly smaller and I get a wide black margin all the way round the picture. Well done Microsoft.

It may well be that there is some way to configure Media Player so that the pictures will scale to fill the whole screen, but 15 minutes of fiddling around with the menus and the laughably named "help" function did not enable me to find it. Whether it exists is not really the point. Media Player should be able to find out the size of the screen for itself, just as the other players can. And if it can't, a manual configuration option should be easy to find and set.

I guess this means I am a blogger

I went to slashdot this morning, and the top headline was "Glenn Urges Direct-to-Mars trip". The thought that went through my head was that I am sure that Glenn is in favour of Direct-to-Mars, but is he really so influential that this thought deserves a deadline on slashdot. Then, "Oh, John Glenn".

Marketing that appears to be working

I was sitting in a pub today working on my laptop. There actually was WiFi in the pub, but it was ridiculously priced for pay WiFi, so I was working off line. However, I was writing e-mail for sending later. Someone else came up to me and asked me the following question.

"Have you got a Centrino connection on that laptop"?

I sad that I was working offline, and he went away, but the interesting thing is the brandname he asked about. Intel has been promoting the "centrino" brandname for certain laptops using its chips. Specifically, the laptop has to use the Pentium M, have 802.11b (or 11g) wireless, and use the Intel 855 chipset to use the brandname. Intel has been paying for lots of advertising showing people work wirelessly on its "Centrino" laptops. The point has clearly been to associate the "Centrino" name with 802.11 wireless. Judging by this resonse, it is succeeding. Presumably when the gentleman goes into a computer shop to buy his next laptop, he will ask for a "Centrino" system. Presumably, as far as Intel hopes, this will guide him to high end rather than low end laptops, and also will guide him away from laptops with AMD and other non-Intel chips. If he just asks for a machine with WiFi or "wireless", or "802.11" this won't happen, but this is presumably what Intel is trying to prevent. So good marketing for them. Trying to attach a proprietary name to a non-proprietary product is always fun. (Apple is good at this, too. Bring on airport extreme).

(As it happens, my laptop does satisfy Intel's requirements to be called a "Centrino" system. It has a Pentium M, it has 802.11g wireless, and it has the 855 chipset. However, you won't see the word "Centrino" on it anywhere, and the most prominent brandname is Dell's. (There are small stickers on the front right saying "Intel Inside: Pentium M" and also "Designed for Microsoft Windows XP"). Dell has no wish to promote Intel's brands excessively, I suspect, and Intel is unable to insist upon it. Dell must be Intel's single biggest customer, and Dell must be able to drive a very hard bargain. The big thing that Dell can threaten Intel with is the possibility that they might start offering AMD based machines as well as Intel based machines (or in an extreme case they could switch entirely to AMD, although this is not likely). Intel would obviously be appalled if they did this, so at the moment Dell gets to impose most of the conditions, I think. Competition is a fine thing. Shame it is so much harder to have any kind of similar hold over Microsoft).

Update: It turns out that to be called a "Centrino", a laptop also has to have Intel's own 802.11 hardware, whereas mine has an 802.11g mini PCI card that is Dell branded. Apparently the base (802.11b) configuration of the Dell Inspiron 8600 does use the Intel wireless hardware and so can be called a "Centrino", but this one cannot. That seems unnecessarily complex.

I am meddlesome

While having a latte in my favourite bookstore cafe this afternoon, I was browsing M.J. Simpson's biography of the late Douglas Adams. When his daughter Polly was born in 1994, a room was redecorated for her, and Adams' wife Jane expressed the observation that the ethernet port in the room could perhaps be removed. However, Adams insisted that it stay, as he thought his daughter would need it soon enough. (Apparently, Polly's first computer (a mac) was indeed bought for her when she was three).

Reading this, though, I was struck by the fact that the wired house with ethernet ports seems kind of quaint now. I managed to avoid being in a position where I had a home that needed wiring in the 1990s, and I now know that I am never going to do this. I do now have a "home ethernet", but it just consists of a little box that is an all in one DSL modem, router, and wireless access point. If I ever want to connect more than one computer to the ethernet, I just buy a (trivially cheap) wireless card for the computer, and bingo. If I move house, I just take it all with me. No rewiring required. Soon I suspect that all kinds of devices: printers, speakers, scanners, set top boxes, televisions, you name it are all going to have inbuilt wireless. It is going to be an interesting time.

However, there are still complications. I was in PC World today, and a customer wanted wireless in his home for his laptop. He already had a cable internet connection, and the salesman was attempting to sell him a router/wireless access point. Or was he trying to sell him just an access point. The salesman had a puzzled look on his face. Because I sometimes can't help it, I interrupted, explaining that there were three things needed: a modem to connect to the internet, a router so that more than one computer coud use the same internet connection, and a wireless access point for wireless access, and that there were various combinations of these devices available in one unit. If he had a cable internet connection with a modem with an RJ-45 socket as supplied by his ISP (which I believe is standard) then he needed a router and a wireless access point, preferably in the same unit. I either may or may not have got the message across. (Talking about software routers was something that I think wisely I avoided).

But I can't help myself sometimes. Certainly the huge amount of similar but slightly different network hardware on the shelves of a place like that is complicated.

That was a long hiatus from blogging

Alan Little discusses a list of the most successful 50 films ever in Germany by number of tickets sold.

This is actually an interesting metric, and one I have not seen before. Normally there are two ways of comparing box office grosses. The simplest is simply the nominal box office gross. This is simply the number of dollars spent on tickets for the film, with no adjustment for inflation at all. This is fine for comparing films released in the same year, and quite meaningful for films released in the same decade, but after that it becomes highly misleading if it is read in a simple way. The other was is inflation adjusted box office gross. It should be noted that the inflation rate that is being adjusted for is not the general inflation rate, but the inflation rate in cinema ticket prices. The box office gross for the film is divided by the average ticket price for the year in which the film was released, and the resulting number is multiplied by the average ticket price now. (This may be a multi-step process if a film has features multiple re-releases in different years).

Therefore, in crude terms, the inflation adjusted gross compares the films in terms of the total number of tickets sold. This is probably a better metric that simple (nominal) box office gross, but it is still a flawed one. The population of the US and other countries has increased considerably over time, so that the same number of tickets sold today means that a substantially smaller percentage of the population has seen a film than was the case in 1950. On the other hand, there are many other alternative forms of entertainment that people can spend their money on these days, so the comparison isn't really a direct one, but a key point is that it is possible for more people to see a film than in the past simply because there are more people.

And why did I say "crude terms" above. Well, the inflation adjusted box office gross would be a direct comparison in terms of ticket numbers sold if the average ticket price was the same for all films, and this is manifestly not so. Children's tickets cost less than adult tickets, and therefore the average ticket price is quite a lot lower for children's films than for films aimed at adult audiences. Therefore, if you carefully took this factor into account, and genuinely attempted to rank films by numbers of tickets sold, then children's films would jump considerably higher up the list than they do actually appear. Which is what appears to have been done wiith this German list. Grosses and numbers of tickets sold is further boosted for Disney films by the fact that Disney for many years made a lot of money re-releasing each of its its classic animated films every nine years or so, on the basis that there was a new generation of children every nine years who hadn't seen them. (Disney still does rerelease its old animated films from time to time in the cinema, but this is less of a big deal than it used to be because most of Disney's revenues on its old animated films now come from DVD and VHS).

And this, apparently, is the kind of list Alan is looking at. It has lots of children's films on it, precisely as one would expect in these circumstances. It has lots of recent children's films, which is unsurprising given that the current generation of people between about 10 and 25 (the "baby boom echo" generation) is the largest in history in purely numerical terms. Which is why the first Harry Potter film features as high as it does.

This is why the exhibition industry was so unhappy that there was no Harry Potter movie last year. Exhibitors make most of their money from selling Coke and popcorn, and the amount of Coke and popcorn sold is proportional to the total number of people there (and children may even consume more on average than adults). And the number of people who were there for the Harry Potter films was just gigantic.

As for The Jungle Book being at the very top, this isn't that surprising. It is one of Disney's finest animated films, and although it would not be at the very top of a similar list calculated for the US, it is possible that it might be in or near the top ten. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs is the highest grossing Disney animated film in inflation adjusted US terms, but the fact that it was first released in 1937 would have meant there were certain obstacles to its performing at the box office in Germany in quite the same way it did in the US. (Just out of interest, Disney a couple of years back chose what they considered the ten best (or at least the ten potentially most commercially lucrative) of their animated movies for special "Platinum editiion" treatment on DVD. The ones they chose were Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, Bambi, The Jungle Book, Cinderella, The Little Mermaid, Lady and the Tramp, and 101 Dalmatians. Maybe the list is a little heavy on 1980s/90s Ashman/Merkin, or maybe not. (This genuinely was a golden era). But The Jungle Book always ends up on any list of Disney's best.

A sad announcement

I have a great many things on my plate between now and at least June, and as a consequence I am going to be unable to blog on a daily basis for at least the next little while. I am thus going to cease to blog daily on this blog. I may still write occasional pieces on Samizdata and ubersportingpundit, and when I do I shall link from here. But daily is just going to be too much effort.

Update: Just to clarify that, this does not mean I am abandoning this blog, but it does mean blogging shall be less regular, and pieces shall likely be shorter.

Some things really are inspiring.

When I was studying in Australia in the late 1980s, I would frequently visit the Valhalla Cinema in Glebe Point Road near the University of Sydney. This cinema at that time showed very offbeat and unusual films. (Soon afterwards it switched to more ordinary "art cinema" material, which is what it was still showing last thing I knew). In any event, in 1988 (I think) the cinema showed a "splatter film" from New Zealand named Bad Taste. So called "splatter films", in which characters run around at one another, waving weapons and covering one another with tomato sauce and sheeps brains, are a common thing to be produced by amateurs making films on miniscule budgets, because this is about the least expensive genre in which to make a film. This film had a more amusingly create plot than many - aliens come to earth to kill lots of humans to harvest the meat for the new human-burger bar that is being set up somewhere in the galaxy, and a group of people working for a special agency of the New Zealand government that does such things stop them, but, basically it is a film of the director and his friends running around, waving axes at one another and covering one another with sheeps brains and tomato sauce.

As splatter films went, it was pretty good. It had a weird sense of humor. And the audiences at the Valhalla enjoyed it. Playing an alien named "Derek" was the director, someone named Peter Jackson who had managed to rope his family and friends into making this with him. A couple of years later he made Meet the Feebles, a low budget parody (I suppose) of the muppets, which is the grossest, most disgusting film ever made with puppets. And after that he made another splatter film, Brain Dead (released in the US as Dead Alive), which helped spread his obscure cult following around the world.

After that, though, Jackson took an unexpected turn, making a film that was seen as an art film, Heavenly Creatures, the true and notorious story of two girls in New Zealand in the 1950s whose active fantasy life led to them murdering the mother of one of the girls. The film is notable for its remarkable character development, fine acting (this was the film that introduced Kate Winslet to the world) and particularly the extraordinary dream sequences of the actual fantasy life of the girls. This film was seen as a departure at the time, but these sequences in particular now seem a bridge between the splatter scences of the earlier movies and the armies of Orcs in certain later films. This film got Jackson lots of notice, an Academy Award nomination for screenplay for himself and his writing (and other) partner Fran Walsh, and opportunities to work with the Hollywood system. However, he insisted on making films for Hollywood in New Zealand with his existing crew. He made a film called The Frighteners for Universal, but it was not a hit. Perhaps largely as a consequence, his planned remake of King Kong was cancelled. (Around this time he made a hilarious spoof documentary called Forgotten Silver for New Zealand television. Then though, in a story I have told before, he then managed to persuade New Line Cinema to fund him to make three films of The Lord of the Rings. Again, he managed to make them entirely in New Zealand, and with his existing crew.

And of course the last of these films won eleven Academy Awards last night. The Oscar ceremony consisted of a succession of troupes of New Zealanders coming to the stage and thanking Peter Jackson and other New Zealanders, to the extent that Billy Crystal joked at one point that everyone in New Zealand had been thanked and it was time to start again from the top.

Brian Micklethwait, commenting on this, observed the following

With LOR3 (although actually what was being congratulated was the totality of LORs 1-3) doing so well, we also got to see lots of dreary New Zealander technicians making speeches. Their problem was that they sounded so pathetically apologetic. We're not worthy! We're not worthy! That was the vibe they gave off. NZers know how to look worthy winners of the Rugby World Cup (although they have rather lost the trick of actually winning it), so why can't they accept Oscars as if they think they deserved them? (Ghastly thought: maybe when the All Blacks do finally win the Rugby World Cup again, their captain will break down in tears.)

I actually didn't mind all the dreary New Zealanders making speeches. The main reason I felt this is because their story is as good as it is. The story of how Jackson started filming members of his family running around waving axes at one another and ended up making movies for hundreds of millions of dollars that grossed billions of dollars and won eleven Academy Awards on the same evening is an immensely inspiring one and is a great story for him. But is is a great story for most of the other people as well. 21 people won Oscars for The Return of the King last night, and almost all of these have been working with Jackson for a long time as he has slowly been putting his film-making crew together. A number of them have been with him since Bad Taste, and a large portion since Heavenly Creatures. And oh boy, have they come a long way. And boy, do they all deserve their awards.

And I will officially stop blogging about movies for a little while, I think.

Redirection

I have a piece speculating about the winners of this evening's Oscar race over at Samizdata (and some sidebars at Michael Jennings extra).

My digital camera does not do well in unusual or poor light conditions, I know.

It is one of the basic facts of being a technically savvy person that you end up doing lots of unpaid tech support for your friends and family. This is fine. I actually find locating and solving technical problems to be kind of satisfying, so a lot of the time I don't actually mind. (I am not sure how I feel about Perry de Havilland's home ethernet though. Debugging this is sort of like entering an intellectual cavern of death) And anyway, if nothing else your friendds and family end up buying you lunch quite frequently.

But this appears to be a new one. A campaign appears to be underway to ensure that I ultimately obtain the same model of digital camera as lots of other bloggers, so that I will then solve their problems as well as mine. This is, shall we say, an interesting development.

Further evidence that there is no reason for leaving the basement.

Yesterday, I realised that I wanted the DVD of Richard Linklater's semi-animated film Waking Life. I am not really prepared to pay any more for it that I would pay to see an ordinary film in the cinema, but lots of new DVDs can now be bought for less than that these days, so no huge obstacle, one would think. However, the deep discounting occurs on more mainstream films, and the more arty films are often harder to find cheap (although it can be done). I thought that today I might wander down to central Croydon, perhaps stop for a pint at my local, and look in the Virgin Megastore to see if they have the DVD cheap.

However, I was a little slow to get going, and browsed around on the internet. As it happened, I ended up buying the DVD from a place in Canada for £5.59 including postage. That's right. I just bought a DVD from a store in Canada to save myself a short walk. God bless the internet.

Update: Actually I went for the walk anywhere, and saw a movie while I was at it. The Virgin Megastore wanted £9.95 for the DVD, so I saved money by buying it from Canada, although the picture quality would have been marginally better on the British DVD.

Last observation on the Lomborg evening

Fellow Samizdatista Andy Duncan felt the need to introduce me to a few people that he knew, and in response, a couple of people (separately) came up out of the audience and said things like. "So you're Michael Jennings. I like your stuff. It's very nice to meet you". I seem to be developing a little bit of a reputation. This is interesting.

Redirection

I have a report on Bjørn Lomborg's lecture at the Adam Smith Institude this evening at Samizdata.

Activities

I am going out to hear a lecture by Bjørn Lomborg. A report on that (probably at Samizdata) later today or tomorrow some time.

Redirection

I have posted a quote about whether governments should be paying for asteroid protection over at Samizdata. (The comments discussion that follows it is a fun one, too).

Cute

Well, this Flipstart handheld is the smallest full function PC I have ever seen, although we apparently have to wait until the end of the year to see it, which means it is really just vaporware. Still, at one pound it is amazingly small and light. As I see it, though, the two problems are (a) that the keyboard is so small that I wouldn't be able to touch type, and (b) that although the machine is described as having an optional DVD/CD-RW drive, this is clearly an external drive. And if it is external I might as well just buy a bigger laptop. A DVD player is one thing I do want on a machine that I carry with me when I travel, because it allows me to watch DVDs and VCDs. And a CD writer is worth having too. (For instance, I can back up my photographs and send myself the CD). So it might actually be better to use something like this Sony instead. This one has the advantage of not being vaporware and of being a mass market product, and I could probably have one of my own within half an hour if I was willing to spend the money). It is interesting that the size of CDs and DVDs is becoming a limiting factor. 7cm CDs and DVDs have always been supported by the DVD and CD standards bodies (and conventional players can play them as well as 12cm discs) but they have only ever gained (extremely small) niche markets and all commercially produced CDs and DVDs use the standard 12cm size. One option would be to put a drive that only supports the 7cm format on handheld computers like this - that way it would fit in the form factor. The trouble with that is that the principal reason I want a DVD drive on my computer is to allow me to play conventional DVDs with movies on them, and these are all in 12cm format. I am not sure that the Hollywood studios have any desire to release future formats with 7cm discs. There has been some discussion as to whether the future high-definition DVD should use the existing laser wavelength and codecs with higher compression ratios or whether it should use a shorter wavelength and the same MPEG-2 codec as conventional DVDs. A third option might be to use both these things, and then sell discs with movies on them to consumers in 7cm format.

But I don't think this will happen. The libraries of 12cm CDs and DVDs that we have already are too big. There is still too much to be gained from the higher capacity of a larger disc. The better option would be to make it easy for us to take our existing DVDs, rip the contents and recompress them with higher compression ratio codecs, and burn them onto 7cm DVDs ourselves, just as people do with the music on their CDs. And of course hard discs will be large enough before too long to store a good number of movies anyway. At that point it will be possible to store movies on our hard drive before going on a trip, and watching them along the way. (iMovies anyone?) Still, this will still deny us the option of buying a DVD from a shop when we are travelling and then playing it on our PC. (And of course the MPAA may well attempt to prevent us doing many of these things because of "piracy" concerns. Or it may not. We will see if it learns any lessons from the demise of the music industry).

And of course it may be that these ultra-small PCs remain a niche product anywhere, or that they merge with whatever our mobile phones are evolving into.

And of course the keyboard may reamain the limiting factor. I want to be able to touch-type, and these new machines are too small for this. It may be that machines the size of the Sony are about as small as wew are going to go. If so, a 12cm optical drive is going to fit. Additional advances may be in weight and thickness rather than size. It would be nice if a machine that size could be got down to 1.5 pounds or so.

Update Sony and Fujitsu have miniature computers without optical drives, too, although neither are quite as small as the FlipStart, although both seem too have more manageable keyboards.

Observation

People who have come here from Catthy Seipp's Front Page Magazine piece might like to know that the post she referred to is here, although there isn't much more to it than Cathy quoted. There are some nice pictures of Parc Guell in Barcelona in the post immediately above it though.

More magic

Eugene Volokh also taught me one other clever trick. Unfortunately it won't tell my readers the number of trackbacks. It's easy enough to get technorati to send me an e-mail when someone leaves one though, so it is reasonably good. However, one must pay for it, and the whole point of using blogspot is not paying for it. Still, this trackbacks via technorati feature is clearly something that has been there in a feature sense for a while, but which has not been widely publicised in the blogosphere. It will be interesting to see how fast it spreads (at least amongst people using blogger) now that one of the big blogs is using it.

Revelation of the Day

Most of the nonanonymous cobloggers on the [Volokh] Conspiracy are Jewish.

Oooh. Scary.

This post is intended to offend all Belgians equally

I am with Natalie Solent. I have a certain fondness for Belgium, too. She is quite right about the attraction of ending up in a cafe chair with croque monsieur and an amusingly shaped glass of the best beer in the world. The real question is whether Mark Steyn's Belgian half is Flemish or Walloon. If the former, then he is really Dutch and an heir to the culture that invented modern liberalism. If not, well, he is really sort of French, and that is kind of perplexing.

Redirection

I address the important philosophical question of when a cricket match actually becomes a cricket match over at ubersportingpundit.

My mantra

I have one basic rule with respect to computer problems. And this is, do not ever under any circumstances call tech support. Figure out how to fix the problem myself, good. Google for a fix, good. Ask friends for help, good. Call tech support, no, because they are all idiots. (This rule also may or may not apply to calling your employer's IT helpdesk depending on circumstances). However, this hysterically funny Salon article (irritating click through advertisement before you can read the full article) explains that things are far, far worse than I thought.

Men and their urge to fiddle with cars and/or computers, and more discussion of my own computer needs

When I was a kid, there was a certain sort of young man who you would see with his car on his driveway, and he would have the bonnet up (or he would be underneath the car) and he would be constantly fiddling with the endine, or he would have much of the engine disassembled next to the car. In those days cars were relatively simple devices, and it was possible to figure out how they worked, do their own maintenance, and tweak their performance largely by doing so. And of course there was lots of empty space under the bonnet. It was possible to actually reach in and get at the components of your engine.

Improvements in engineering and the computer revolution have largely killed this. Cars are now full of complicated electronics and sealed box components. Many simple devices (eg a carburetor), have been replaced by more complicated equivalents (fuel injection). There is little empty space, and everything is pushed so close together that it is hard to take apart and put together again. While men still love their cars, car maintenance has become a far more specialised task.

However, something else has come into being, which is the standardisation and compatibility of computer parts. Many men now are frequently to be found with the side of their computer's case open, fiddling with the insides, changing boards and cards, and in extreme cases doing things live overclocking the CPU to tweak it and make it run better. Once again, the insides of desktop computers have lots of open spaces, and lots of places where it is possible to fiddle.

This attitude seems very similar to the old fiddling with the engine of your car business. There is something very male about it. I am not sure if it is the same people who would once have done one who now do the other, however. I would have never bothered with car engines and the like - they are just too dirty and require too much physical effort - but the urge to fiddle around inside computers is for me a strong one.

But perhaps this is going away, too. The percentage of computers sold that are laptops is increasing. Whereas they were once largely just a business tool, they are becoming a major consumer product as well. The growth in readily available wireless networking is making them more attractive as a product too, even if you don't take them out of your house. (Being able to take your computer out the back garden with you is more valuable than you realise until you try it). And laptops are like modern cars. The parts are squashed very close together and there is no space. There are fewer parts that are interchangeable between different brands. You can't get inside and fiddle.

As regular readers know, my only computer is a laptop, and I like this and find it tremendously useful. Fiddling inside computers is largely something I do to the computers of my friends. There is a certain risk in this (for 20 minutes or so last week, this computer would not boot and it was my fault because I had bumped an IDE cable while removing a PCI card. Fortunately, it was easily fixed) but one does also earn kudos after fixing something that does not work. When I have a larger place to live and more money, I think I will build myself a desktop machine from scratch so that I have something to play with / run my entertainment system, and I can use the laptop after that mainly for portability purposes. But the desktop machine will be largely an indulgence. The present laptop on steroids does satisfy all my computing needs for now.

The thing that is a minor irritant is the amount of plugging in that is necessary when I place my laptop on my desk. Power, USB devices (via a single cable that goes into a hub), speakers, Firewire devices (if I had any) all have to be plugged in. Connecting printers, speakers and the like via WiFi is still a nuisance and quite expensive, although it can be done. Wireless USB is thought of but not quite there. Bluetooth has been promised a lot, but Bluetooth devices are not ubiquitous. What I want is wireless of some sort to more or less come as standard with all hardware, so I never have to plug anything in except to the power. We are not there yet, but we are tantalisingly close.

Update: I have just been playing around on my old laptop not on steroids, which was my only computer until December. It has an 550 MHz Intel Celeron, an 800x600 screen, 64Mbytes of RAM, a 5GByte hard disk, CD-ROM only, no ethernet or wireless (although I did run a USB ADSL modem off it, so a fast internet connection was something I did have, although only 64Mbytes of RAM meant that the computer was constantly swapping stuff in and out of RAM and the connection thus was not optimised, shall we say). How did I ever live with this? The new machine has a 1.4GHz Pentium M, a 1920x1200 screen, 512MBytes of RAM, a 60GByte hard disk, a DVD-ROM/CR-RW combo drive, 10/100 ethernet, and 802.11b/g wireless, amongst other things. I continue to be deeply happy with the new machine.

This is a crumby photo.....

but I bet George Orwell didn't anticipate this.



Hmmm. I'm not quite sure what Orwell would make of there being downloadable for free copyright violating versions of his books available from websites in Russia, either.

Reiteration

It's not a new observation, but Norman Borlaug is an extraordinarily great man. That the bulk of the so called "green movement" hates his achievements and the green revolution in general makes their colours very clear I think. Here is one more. They are luddites and romantics, and I do not mean the second word as a compliment. None the less, I think the number of people who understand Borlaug's achievement (and perhaps more importantly who appreciate his mindset, which is if anything a greater thing that what he has achieved with it) is steadily getting greater. Here is Here is one more, anyway.

(Link via Jackie D)

It is a small world after all

Yesterday evening, for slightly peculiar reasons I missed a train at Stockport railway station. I blogged about it, and via the miracle of comments I discovered that one of my readers was on the same railway station at the same time.

I'm in Manchester

So, blogging may be a little light, depending on WiFi availability and whether I feel like it. Meanwhile, I have a tiny piece on an exciting cricket match between New Zealand and South Africa over at ubersportingpundit.

Redirection

My overview of the end of year movie releases and the ensuing Oscar season is up at Samizdata.

Update: I also have a funny photograph I took at East Croydon station this morning up at Transport Blog.

Someone offer me a job in London soon

I need a beige iPod.

Interesting reading

It has been commented on elsewhere in the blogosphere and it is quite long, but this Nicholas Eberstadt piece from Policy Review on the demographics of Europe and Asia is pretty much compulsory reading. The basic issue is that fertility has dropped virtually everywhere, the UN medium variant overstates population and the UN low variant might be a better estimate, and that almost everywhere we have dramatically dropping fertility and rapidly aging populations. Japan is much commented on and although Japan is certainly not going to take over the world with its demographics as they are, Japan is so rich that it probably can cope. (Also, Japan is such an advanced economy that it is reasonable for people to work longer, because its economy isn't terribly labour intensive). On the other hand, the one child policy in China was a huge mistake, and the demographic consequences could be catastrophic. China's population is aging faster than anything else, and when China hits its demographic crisis it will not be rich, and will have no developed pension system and it will be harder for people to stay in the workforce because jobs in China will be more labour intensive. India faces a much less dramatic demographic precipice, but the same issues do ultimately come up there too. What China and India have in common is their sex ratios are unbalanced, due to a strong preference for boys and the presence of the technology to allow sex determination and abortions. The consequences of this may not be nice either.

What is extraordinary though is the demographic dynamism of the United States. The combination of immigration and higher fertility means that its population is going to actually grow faster than that of almost anywhere else in Eurasia, including India, China and Indonesia. It's place as the third most populous country in the world is in no danger, and in fact it is pulling away. What do we deduce from this? For one thing, don't look for the economic and political power of the US to decline any time soon. This is one little indicator suggesting that when the Americans say they are exceptional, they are right.

But go read the whole thing. It is fascinating, although it doesn't discuss the demographics of the Middle East or of Africa. Much of the Middle East continues to grow like crazy in population terms, but seems to lake the other cultural features needed to do anything useful with the extra population (Human capital is the best thing you can possibly have if you can then use it. But there do seem to be some countries that, at this point in their development at least, are unable to do so. And AIDS is doing horrendous things to the demographics of Africa.

Silly search request time

Hmm, what exactly defines failure in this case?

Actually I have the Japanese special edition CD, which I bought in Tower Records Shibuya. So there.

Actually, you may have come to the right place. I hear the movie is really good, too. Shame I am going to have to wait at least six months to see it. (And Julie Delpy is very beautiful, yes).

Once in a while, yes. But I never drive as well.

Cool

I don't know about you, but I rather like being a member of a new Tocquevillean elite.

Wrecks of great historical significance

It seems that the remains of the HMS Beagle (ie the ship on which Charles Darwin travelled around the world) may have been found at the bottom of a marsh in Essex. Cool. I am not sure that it will fit properly in the Science Museum in Kensington, however. (And to tell the truth getting it through Chelsea might be a bit of a problem, too). Shame.

(Link via slashdot).

Update: A Samizdata editor also thought this was cool, so I posted a slightly expanded version of this post over there.

Blogging remains light

However, I did today manage to do my laundry and the washing up, and go and have a nice south Indian meal with a blogger from out of town.