Yowee

Shrek 2 grossed $104.3 million (including estimates and projections - for several reasons I am not going into here I expect the final number to be higher) over the weekend in North America. That's the second largest three day gross of any film ever (after Spiderman two years ago, which managed $114.8). After two lacklustre and very expensive films (Van Helsing and Troy) over the last two weeks and after ordinary looking grosses for Shrek 2 on Wednesday and Thursday, it looked like the summer wasn't going so well and that perhaps the "DVDs are cannibalising theatrical grosses" theory was getting more evidence. However, this is enormous. If the ludicrous "Global warming causes the ice caps to melt, the Gulf Stream to stop, and an ice age to occur, and all by next Wednesday" film The Day After Tomorrow turns out to be the fun guilty pleasure I expect next weekend, and the third Harry Potter film the week after is as good as advance word says it is, it may be that in two weeks time everybody has forgotten the box office decline theory and Hollywood is talking about a record summer, and by a big margin. For what it is worth, it probably will be a record summer (at least in nominal terms) but I do not expect the margin to be all that great. Summers have a history of petering out when the Olympic Games are on - this was not such an issue in 2000 because the games were held late due to being in the southern hemisphere, but it was a very big issue in 1992 and 1996. I expect that this will happen this year too, although if the Greeks completely screw up, and the games are cancelled, that would be great for Hollywood. (Things may slow down in Europe due to the European football championship, too, so it may not be as big a box office summer internationally as in the US).

I have a longer article on all this in preparation for Samizdata.

Update: As I predicted (I rock), with the Sunday estimates the gross has been revised upwards to $106.7m. (What "estimates" means in this case is that we have Sunday numbers based on most theatres having reported in - including virtually all large theatres. The previous number included "projections" for Sunday - that is numbers based on what it was believed the Sunday gross would be given the Friday and Saturday grosses). Blimey this is a big hit, particularly given that it cost less than half as much (and perhaps a lot less than half as much) as either Van Helsing or Troy to make, and that family films make substantially more money on VHS and DVD than any other genre. We are talking something like a billion dollar profit on a hundred million dollar investment here.

Further Update: The final number is $108.0m, so we really aren't all that far behind Spiderman. That of course ended up with a total gross of just over $400m.

Splendid

Well, it seems that after immense effort, the holy grail of the blue rose has just about been perfected. What I want to know is whether Gallium Nitride was used anywhere in its development.

Redirection

I have a piece on the ongoing cricket test between England and New Zealand, with reference to a peculiar incident involving a cricket ball and a pint of beer, over at ubersportingpundit.

"Pigeon research will not stand still; if we do not experiment, other powers will."

Apparently, MI14 was entirely serious

Redirection

I have a piece on the latest developments in the Zimbabwean cricket farce over at ubersportingpundit.

None of the present offers are good enough

It seems some people are willing to offer quite a bit in return for a gmail account. As it happens I have one of my own, and Google have given me the power to grant gmail accounts to two other people. Any good offers? (In fact, I think I am willing to give them to the first two people who ask me, to tell the truth).

Update: Well, that was a quick way to discover it I had any readers. The gmail accounts are gone.

Wednesday Evening Song Lyrics

Falling for you
Did you ever see me,
Watching from periphery?
I was playing another game
I hoped you catch on all the same.

Falling from view
Did you ever touch me,
Floating through your potpourri?
I thought I felt your fingers once
After waiting all these months

But I was wrong, so wrong
That was just another song you wrote, for another girl
And I hoped the day could be
When you'd write a song for me

But it never came,
I thank you all the same,
But I'll go now, so you won't know how much I've

Fallen for you,
Pointless trying to be a man
Boy, you don't know if you can
I thought I knew you well enough
But your walls are still too tough

But I was wrong, so wrong
That was just another song you wrote, for another girl
And I hoped the day could be
When you'd write a song for me

But it never came,
I thank you all the same,
But I'll go now, so you won't know how much I

Thought about you all the time,
Walking round, the Guggenheim.
Like a rhyme, in my mind,
There you are, in my car,
But we don't drive very far.
To the beach, out of reach
Next to me... my fantasy

Falling for you
Did you ever see me,
Watching from periphery?
I was playing another game
I hoped you catch on all the same.

-- Fallen for You, by Sheila Nicholls, from the soundtrack of Stephen Frears' film adaptation of Nick Hornby's High Fidelity

Explanation

I will be horrendously busy for the next week. Blogging will be light to nonexistent.

High expectations

The summer movie season in the US used to start on the Memorial Day holiday, and the box office statistics until recently reflected this fact. However, ever since Twister was a big hit when released two weeks before Memorial Day in 1996, the studios have started rolling out their big summer movies starting from two weeks before Memorial Day. A couple of years ago, the box office statistics compiled by AC Nielsen EDI were adjusted to reflect this fact.

This year the first big summer movie was released three weeks before Memorial Day. (This may be a one off thing. Memorial Day is late in the month this year. EDI tweaked the definition of summer again to take this into account). That first move was Universal's Van Helsing. This movie really sucked, and after two weekends it has limped to $85 million in North America after two weekends. This is perceived as not especially good, given that the film cost at least $160m to make, but the studios are making so much money from DVDs these days that the film will probably make money.

That film was followed this weekend by Troy, which managed a middling $47 million gross. Warner Bros are admitting to a $150m budget for this film, but it is rumoured to be much higher. I have heard $250 mentioned, and although I don't think I believe this that would make it the most expensive film of all time, in nominal dollars at least. On that budget a $47 million opening gross is disappointing, although the DVD factor again comes into play and the film will make money in the end. (One thing Warners will take heart in is that the film gross on Sunday of its first weekend was substantially better than expected. This is normally a sign that audiences like a film and the film's grosses are going to hold up well in subsequent weeks, so the film's final gross could still be quite good).

But still, the summer has started in a rather lackluster fashion. Rather worse than last year in fact, when the summer started really well with the X-Men sequel. Things will probably perk up this weekend, with Dreamworks' Shrek 2, followed by The Day After Tomorrow on the Memorial Day weekend (which is apparently a very spectacular and exciting movie, however ludicrous its science) and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkhaban a week after that (which also has extremely positive advance word).

What has changed thid summer is that more and more movies are now getting simultaneous releases around the world. There are two reasons for this. One is more frequently stated, which is that this is a way to fight piracy. Hollywood is frightened of illicit (or even legal) DVDs hitting the streets in countries before films are released theatrically, and releasing them in lots of other countries simultaneously makes this much harder. The second reason is that it is impossible to keep publicity campaigns from crossing national borders these days. A US publicity campaign gets attention all round the world, and the way to take advantage all round the world is to have the movie showing there too. So the summer movie season is now starting everywhere at the same time, whereas it used to start in the US earlier than everywhere else. Also, the two big summer movies so far have been released in Britain the same weekend as in the US, so I have seen them.

Van Helsing did, as I said, suck. Troy was somewhat better, but it has the same problem as any movie based on that story. This is that the part of Helen is impossible to cast. Virtually anyone is going to get the response of "A thousand ships?. Her. Give me a break". It is a truly thankless role for anyone to play, and this one is the same. Diane Kruger is perfectly attractive, but she doesn't strike me as greatly remarkable. She doesn't manage to be this great idealised beauty. Or at least not to me. It's a nighmare role for casting directors and actors, because nobody can possibly live up to the ideal.

Oddly, I observed a similar state of affairs in real life once. I was in the US in 2000, and an attempted meeting with a friend had not worked out, so I somehow found myself driving through the towns along the Connecticut coast looking for something to do. On the map, I saw the town of Mystic, once one of many cod fishing ports of New England, but today a town largely catering to tourists and day trippers from New York. I drove into town.

Mystic was familiar to me, as a movie set in the town named Mystic Pizza had been made a few years earlier. This told the story of three young women (played by Lili Taylor, Annabeth Gish, and the then unknown Julia Roberts) who worked as waitresses in a local pizza restaurant named "Mystic Pizza". As I drove into town I discovered that the pizza restaurant in which the film had been set was perfectly real, right down to the "A Slice of heaven" slogan on the pizza boxes. I parked the car, went in and ordered a slice of pizza a beer. The waitress who served me was about the same age as the three women in the movie, and was perfectly nice and perfectly attractive, but I kind of felt sorry for her. Because clearly a substantial portion of the people who walked into the restaurant came in and the first thing that went through their minds was that she was no doubt quite attractive, but was not the 21 year old Julia Roberts. And that would be a fairly hard ideal to live up to.

My annual television viewing experience

As I do on the appropriate evening most years, on Saturday evening I sat down to watch the Eurovision song contest, this year live from Istanbul. (The Turks won it last year, and the winner gets to host the event the next year. This policy almost sent the Irish national television company bankrupt when Ireland won the constest three years in a row in the 1990s, but I digress). Istanbul is a good place to host it, if only because it is amongst the most stunningly beautiful cities in the world, and this at least provides from pretty pre-filmed interstitial sequences between the acts.

In a move to demonstrate solidarity with Britain's European partners, I opened a can of German beer and turned on the television. I only paid vague attention to the actual performances of the songs, because as a general rule the songs aren't very good. One is occasionally distracted by some particularly ludicrous outfits, or by some particularly creative way in which the performers take most of their clothes off at the end of a song, or by somebody playing a nose flute, but nothing on the song contest was really up to the Buffy episodes that I was watching on DVD at the same time. Nothing as good as the glorious Alf Poier of Austria who sung about his homepage (and who I actually voted for last year.

However, once the singing stops, it gets fun. We get a half-time performance that attempts to convey some of the local colour of the home city while people are voting, and then we get down to the serious stuff - the voting. Since the end of the Cold War, the number of countries who can participate in the contest has increased dramatically, and many of these somewhat obscure eastern countries are quite exciting by anothing that draws attention to their country, including Eurovision contests. So there are now lots of entrants. When this problem came along a decade or so ago, relegation was introduced and the countries that get the lowest scores were excluded from the competition for the next year, but got to come back automatically the year after that. However, this year there was a new innovation, which was the instituation of a semi-final round. Those countries that did not get enough points last year and those that had been left out last year participated in a separate contest (shown only on cable and satellite television in the UK) a few days earlier. The countries that got the most points in that competition went through to the main contest. (United Kingdom, Spain, France, and Germany) get automatic selection to the main contest, on the basis that they are the countries that pay for the European Broadcasting Union).

Why am I telling you this? Well, because it affected the format of the main contest. Whereas in the past only the participating countries in the main contest got to vote, in the new format all countries that entered got to vote. So although only 24 countries got performers to sing songs, viewers in all 36 countries got to vote. And as I mentioned, the voting is the fun part. As in football, the effects of two thousand years of history can be seen in the outcome of the voting. And the more countries that vote, the merrier. Certain countries traditionally vote for one another. The most extreme example is Greece and Cyprus, which invariably give one another the maximum 12 points. There is no way this will not happen. The universe will end first. And traditionally the Nordic countries give points to one another (with the possible exception of Norway) although this did not happen so much this year because most of the Nordic countries didn't make it past the semi-final round.

And there is what may be called the ethnic minority issue. Germany always gives lots of points to Turkey, not perhaps so much because the Germans are huge funs of the Turkish people as that there are a huge number of ethnically Turkish people living in Germany. And the same perhaps goes for the Mecedonians giving maximum points to the Albanians.

Which leads to a curious fact: which is Balkan bloc voting. Virtually all the countries in the Balkans: Greece, Macedonia, Albania, Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia, Bulgaria etc gave lots of points to one another. This strikes me as perhaps more curious than Nordic bloc voting. Denmark and Sweden are on pretty good terms with one another on the whole, but the people of the various countries of the Balkans have spent much of the last 15 years killing one another, which makes it kind of curious that they now vote for one another. For instance, when Croatia gives the maximum 12 points to Serbia, as actually happened on Saturday, there is not so much I can say other than what the fuck? (One thing that does mean is that most of the Balkan countries will be back next year, as they managed to give one another enough points to avoid any of them being relegated, I think.

But it did lead to an interesting possibility on Saturday night. As the voting got underway, it was pretty clear before long that it was a two way race between Serbia and Montenegro (whose song did feature the nose flute) and the Ukraine (whose "song" was more about dancing than singing, and which featured a troupe of leather clad Xena Warrior Princess impersonators. Serbia and Montenegro took an early lead, suggesting the very surreal prospect of the contest going to Belgrade next year. That would have been interesting - perhaps we could have had Ceca, the world's most evil pop star, as the half time act, but it would have made a lot of the media contingent relatively nervous, I suspect. In the end though the Ukrainian leather fetishests won out, and by about the three quarter mark in the voting it was clear that Terry Wogan was going to Kiev next year. Which will be interesting in itself. I fear that Kiev is a fairly drab place as (a) I don't think that I have ever seen a picture of the city and (b) 80 years of communism will do that to you. I suspect that means that next year we will not have glorious scenic shots as in Istanbul, which is kind of a shame.

And there is of course one final thing that needs reporting on when discussing the Eurovision contest, which is whether anyone managed "nul points", as it is normally put. (There are two major events in the world which operate on the old diplomatic tradition of French and English: the Olympic Games and the Eurovision Song Contest). It is actually quite difficult to score no points at all in the Eurovision Song Contest, as there have always been more than 20 other countries to vote for you, and each gets to give points to ten other countries. In most years everybody picks up at least a couple of points from someone. However, Nordic bloc voting notwithstanding, there is something of a tradition of Norwegians ending up with the dreaded nul. (One or two Norwegians have actually become famous on this achievement, to the limited extent that Norwegians can become famous). However, last year something happened for the first time: which was that the British entrant managed nul points. This was quite shocking, but it didn't lead to relegation, as Britain are one of the four countries that cannot be relegated. This year's British entrant was not in any way a contender, but managed to pick up enough points here or there to finish in the lower half of the middle of the table. However, one other thing did almost happen. With 36 countries voting, it should be even harder to manage to score no points, but with just a few votes to come in, it looked just like old times. The Norwegian entrant was the last entrant sitting there on nul, for a long long time. But sadly, in a belated piece of trans-Nordic voting, the Swedes gave three points to the Norwegians. This was deeply sad, and the Norwegian entrant ended up with an unremarkable three points, rather than one of the legendary nuls. Oh well.

However, with the semi-final stage there is always next year. In recent years the 3 points would have meant Norwegian relegation, but it is possible that they qualify for the main event next year. And then all nuls are possible.

Redirection

I have a piece on the Bangladesh cricket team in general, and in particular on their present one day series with the West Indies, over at ubersportingpundit.

Redirection

I have a little schadenfreude on Mirror editor Piers Morgan's resignation sacking over at Samizdata.

Food blogging

Today, my breakfast includes some "Toulouse sausages", bought from Sainsbury's yesterday, described on the packaging as "a wonderfully flavoursome French recipe of coarsely chopped pork and bacon, richly seasoned with red wine, garlic and fresh parsley" (their use of bold). With it I am having some unsmoked lean back bacon, the consumption of which demonstrates I am a wimp (or so I am told).

Update: The sausages were tasty - pretty heavy on the garlic, but I like that. Australian practice is (or at least was when I was a child) to eat fairly plain beef sausages with tomato sauce (the word "ketchup" was never used - when I visited America and England for the first time in 1991 when I was 22 years old, I did not know what the word meant). These can be excellent, particularly when they are barbecued, but the European idea of sausages packed with all sorts of things to give them flavour is relatively recent, although all kinds of interesting sausages are available now - particularly those from Italian recipes.

However, I am open to new ideas.

Further Update: Somehow, really good food will sit on the bottom of your stomach all day (or at least until your next meal) giving you a warm and satisfied feel. These sausages managed that.

This looks interesting

Apparently a company named Sion Power has developed a Lithium Sulfur battery, that they are claiming has four times the battery life of the Lithium Ion batteries that most of us use in our batteries and laptops these days. Sadly, it can only manage about 300 recharge cycles at the moment, so it is not quite ready for prime time. Shame. Perhaps we will get portable fuel cells first, but clearly the dreadful battery bottleneck is somewhere where we will actually see considerable improvement within a few years.

Ignorance

The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party has lost the Indian general election, and there will certainly be a change of government. Few people expected this, because the general perception (certainly shared by me) has been that India has been booming recently. (Hey, they have even been winning at cricket). The new government looks to be dominated by the formerly long-ruling Congress party, although they will have to have the support of the Communist dominated "Left front" alliance to form a government. (In this day and age, people who used to be communists can end up being a lot of things, I guess). Sonia Gandhi, the Italian born widow of the late Rajiv Gandhi, looks to have a strong chance of becoming the next Prime Minister. As to whether this result means that the new government will reverse the generally free market orientation of the previous government, I have no idea. (I rather doubt it though). Elections are often won and lost for domestic reasons that are not especially apparent to people looking at the country from outside.

And of course, governments do not always end up being what they appear when they are first elected. When it came to power, the BJP appeared (at least to me) to be a rather fearsome party of Hindu nationalism, but the party became much more moderate once it was in power. I suspect this is almost inevitable in as large a country as India, particularly when there are so many competing political forces.

And writing this article, I cannot help but continue to realise just how ignorant I am about everyday Indian politics. India is becoming a very important country, and I rather like those aspects of it that I do know something about, but it is not a place with everyday goings on that are widely reported in the west.

Redirection

I have a piece about up and coming international cricket matches (and why I won't be writing about Australia v Zimbabwe) over at ubersportingpundit.

Redirection

I have a piece on Transport Blog explaining how my choice of a route home was influenced on Tuesday by the fact that I was carrying something heavy.

An odd thought

Lots of people (starting I think with Arts and Letters Daily) have linked to this article by Elinor Burkett about her experiences as an American teaching in central Asia shortly before and then for a substantial period after September 11. The discussion of her discoveries of just what people do and don't know about America (and what the do and don't believe) is intriguing, but it gets surreal towards the end, when she discovers that it is almost universally accepted in the region that America "cheated" in the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Olympics, and locals feel more vehement about this than virtually anything else discussed in the article

In Bishkek, once-friendly taxi drivers assailed me because George W. Bush had bribed judges to deprive Olga Koroleva of the gold medal in women's aerial freestyle skiing. My students railed that the judges had been corrupted by pity for America -- the only possible explanation for Sarah Hughes's triumph over Irina Slutskaya in the figure-skating competition. And in Turkmenistan, strangers in the market ranted at me about the injustice of Larissa Lazutina's disqualification from the games by Americans so threatened by her cross-country-skiing prowess that they'd trumped up a charge of drug use.

This is slightly surreal at the best of times, but it becomes even stranger when you realise that the women's aerial freestyle skiing was won by Alisa Camplin, an Australian. Apparently, although George W Bush is prepared to screw Australia's farmers at any opportunity he gets, he is willing to bribe Olympic judges so that our athletes can win medals. Great.

Wednesday Evening Song Lyrics

Do you always have to tell him everything
On your mind?
You know that too much honesty can be
So unkind
And every time you throw him to the floor
Why are you surprised to see he's breakable?
You always try to find what's holding him
Away from you
But do you ever see your anger standing there
Right between you?
And every time you throw him to the wall
Why are you surprised to see he's breakable?
Tell the world that he's breaking your heart
Go tell the world nothing's ever your fault
Go tell them all
And every time you throw him to the floor
Why are you surprised to see he's breakable?
And every time you push him to the wall
Why are you surprised to see he's breakable?

-- Breakable, performed by Fisher on the soundtrack of Alfonso Cuaron's interesting but flawed modern day adaptation of Great Expectations (1998).

A small town in Germany

If he was a spammer, I would endorse firebombing this house, I think. As it is, I recommend that everybody keeps calm. Whilst I generally am sympathetic to young nerds, a punitive prison sentence is clearly in order here.

See what is presently in the middle of my carpet

Doesn't this look like fun?

Redirection

I have a piece on the puzzle of why terrorists do not have weapons of mass destruction over at Samizdata.

Irritants

My brother's computer (in Australia) got infected by the Sasser worm. He is running Norton Anti-Virus, but this didn't help, as the worm arrived by exploiting a vulnerable port rather than via e-mail. Incoming e-mail is scanned for viruses as a matter of course, but that didn't help with this problem. And although Norton would have deleted the worm if it had been able to run, Sasser kept shutting down the computer before we could get that far. Symantec has a downloadable mini-application to remove Sasser too, but the problem was once again that the machine was shut down by Sasser before he could download and run it. (Yes, there is a way of stopping the shutdown after it starts, but my brother is not a very sophisticated user and it was a relatively hard thing to talk him through).

Eventually we managed to download the Symantec tool on another PC, copy it onto a CD and send him the CD. This copy of the tool we were able to run before Sasser shut down the machine, and therefore we managed to remove Sasser. So my brother's computer (a perfectly nice 3 month old Dell desktop) is now working again.

In terms of support from a distance, this was a hard one. Support from a distance is in many cases getting easier, as I can do such things as remotely take control of my brother's computer over the internet, and just fix the problem myself rather than talk him through it. (It's slow over his dialup connection though). But when a worm keeps shutting his machine down, there is not very much I can do, at least not directly.

Now, I think it is biological analogy time. I think Sasser is like the SARS virus, in the sense that it is very contagious withough being extremely harmful in itself. It shuts computers down and causes strife, but it doesn't do things like mess with or delete files, or wipe out your hard disk, or anything like that. A worm that spread the same way and was damaging could do an untold amount of damage, and I think we are pretty wide open to this kind of thing. And why is it like the SARS virus: well, the SARS virus is basically an extremely nasty variant of the common cold: it is airborne and quite contagious, and it causes nasty symptoms but does not kill very people. However, a nasty airborne varient of influenza would be something else. If we had something as deadly as the 1997 influenza virus that could spread like SARS, we would be in serious trouble, and would be talking tens of thousands of deaths. And even this is a long way short of the nastiness of the influenza of 1918.

They really didn't take enough care when they Romanised the spelling the first time, methinks

This is why the individual's right under the English common law to change his or her name to anything he or she wants is important.

Fermented grape juice

Jackie over at Gastroblog talks about having a wonderful bottle of Argentinian red wine, but doesn't remember what it was. Do find out and tell us Jackie. Argentinian wine has long been one of the great secrets of the winemaking world. The wine is often wonderful - it's a far greater winemaking country than Chile - but it has not traditionally been an exporting country, as the Spanish and Italian descended locals are great consumers of fine wine as well. (Chile lacks a substantial domestic market, so Chilean winemakers turned into exporters). However, the collapse of the peso a year or so ago meant that it became much more attractive to winemakers to export their produce, and we have seen substantially more Argentinian wine in Britain and America. The best wines seem to be mostly made from the Malbec grape in the Mendoza region. This is interesting. Malbec is grown in France, Australia and other places, but there it is mainly a blending grape, being one of the minor grape varieties in wines dominated by Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot. But in Argentina it is used as the dominant (or only) grape variety. And it makes beautiful wines when used this way.

Jackie's wine was brought back from Argentina for her directly rather than bought here, so this change perhaps doesn't really apply. Come to think of it, my friends should treat me really nicely, because I brought some stupendous wine back from Australia with me.

Regional food differences

When I was a child in Australia (as is the case almost everywhere) the selection of food and ingredients available in your average supermarket were not nearly as impressive as they are today. (Fancy gourmet ingredients certainly could be bought (expensively) in Sydney, but the portion of the population who cooked with them was very small. And I didn't live in Sydney). And in many ways they were very limited indeed.

If my mother wanted to buy a tub of ice cream, there were three varieties: vanilla, strawberry, and chocolate (more commonly referred to as white, pink, and brown). And, as a very special innovation, there was something called Neapolitan, which contained all three of those in the same tub. (If my parents had wanted to use food for giving geography lessons, they could have told me that this was named after a city called Naples in Italy, where they make superb ice cream that the stuff in front of us did not resemble in any meaningful way. And we could have gone from there to learning that Bolognese is named after another Italian place called Bologna, and when Australian culinary sophistication proceeded beyond plain cheddar cheese when I was about 12, it could have been explained to me that parmesan cheese was named after another Italian place called Parma. I thus could have realised ten years before I did that whatever may be said about the Italians, they do know something about food. But I digress).

When I was in primany school, the school canteen sold three types of sweet bun. These were the "Cream bun", the "Finger bun", and the curiously named "Chelsea bun". The cream bun did not contain actual cream (as this could not cope with the Australian climate) but instead contained an artificial sugar confection of vaguely cream like texture. The finger bun was long and thin and had pink icing on top, but the reason for the name was obvious from the shape. The Chelsea bun contained fruit, but the reason for the name was obscure to me. I knew vaguely that these sorts of buns were English in origin, but that was about all. I didn't really understand that in England, cream buns did contain actual cream (which didn't go bad due to the cooler weather), and my mind would have boggled had it known that I would one day have a friend (Sir Geoffrey de Havilland's great nephew, no less) who would regularly invite me to fine parties in a place in London called Chelsea, and that he would once or twice even take me for breakfast to a restaurant nearby called "The Chelsea Bun", where the bun may or may not have been invented.

And that is one of the fun things about life. As you grow older, your horizons widen. And you look back and you see that the clues as to how your horizons would widen were there all along, but that you just didn't understand them at the time or understand what they were.

(I started this post to comment on the fact that I had just had pork sausages and unsmoked bacon for breakfast, whereas a week ago in Australia I had beef sausages and smoked bacon. Unsmoked bacon is like cream buns with actual cream in them: not normal in Australia due to the climate).

Redirection

I have a piece on a train company with a stupid name over at Transport Blog.

My laptop becomes a little outdated

Intel is apparently about to release some new versions of the Pentium M. The previous fastest version ran at 1.7GHz, and the fastest version is now 2.0 GHz. (A rough rule of thumb is that a Pentium M gives equivalent performance to a Pentium 4 that is 50% faster in terms of clock speed, so we are talking equivalence to something like a 3.0GHz Pentium 4). There is also a 1.8GHz version and a new 1.7GHz version with physically smaller components than the old version. My laptop has a Pentium M at 1.4GHz, and this clock speed is probably not going to be common for very much longer, at least on relatively high end full size laptops.

This boosting of the range at the high speed end follows Intels announcement of improved Pentium M and Celeron M processors at the low voltage end about a month ago. In particular, there is a 1.1GHz Ultra Low voltage version. Presumably Sony will release a speed bumped version of the drool inducing TR series laptop with the new chip before long. It would be be nice if Sony could offer that machine with a larger hard drive as well at the same time (it presently tops out at 40GHz), but that depends on how quickly Toshiba can come up with a suitable drive. The TR series laptop uses a 1.8 inch hard drive sourced from Toshiba rather than the 2.5 inch drives that are common in most laptops. (Desktop machines normally use 3.5 inch drives). This is the same drive that Apple uses in the standard iPod. It is not a coincidence that the top of the line iPod also has 40Gbyte capacity. (The iPod mini uses a 1 inch drive sourced from Hitachi, that maxes out at 4Gbytes).

And Intel is talking about abandoning the Pentium 4 and using the Pentium M core as the basis for its next generation of 32 bit desktop processors. I suppose that means our computers will be quieter, if nothing else.

Update: Yes, Dell are offering versions of the Inspiron 8600 (which is what I have) with clock speeds of up to 2.0GHz. The 1.4GHz (which is what I have) is still on offer for now, but we will see how long it lasts.

Further Update: And here is the updated Sony TR series (in this case the TR-5), which looks Japan only for now. Sony seem to be selling a narrower range of models in Europe, but I am guessing we will see a model with the 1.1GHz CPU, 802.11a/b/g wireless and an inbuilt DVD writer as standard here before long.

Star making performances

I like watching "teen movies". There are a variety of reasons for this. One is that movies featuring unknown and young actors with low budgets often suffer from less studio interference than larger budget productions and they often have stars and directors and writers with smaller egos who are less likely to ruin the movie through pretentiousness. (Figuring out whether the writer and director of such movies are going to have a career is fun, too).

And of course there is the game of "Look at all the actors and figure out who is going to be a star". This game also applies when you watch the people performing in child and teen roles in non-teen movies, but it is more interesting when you have ten possible future stars in the same movie, and you are trying to figure out just who you will see again. The canonical movie for doing this was of course Fast Times at Ridgemont High, although the game was kind of defeated by almost everyone in the entire movie having later careers of significance, and the writer and director doing so too, although the writer (Cameron Crowe) went on to become a much more famous and successful director than the director (Amy Heckerling, although she went on to make good movies too, most notably Clueless).

Sometimes it is obvious who is going to be a star. Julia Stiles is obviously something special in Ten Things I Hate About You. Lauren Ambrose is easily the best thing in Can't Hardly Wait, although she has gone on to have a notable career in television rather than in the movies so far. Kirsten Dunst was in an endless number of movies as a teen, and it was fairly obvious right from the start that she was a future star.

Sometimes, though, things are different from what you expect. An example, back to Clueless. Alicia Silverstone is just wonderful in the Emma Woodhouse role, and the role was considered a star making one for her by just about everyone at the time. However, for whatever reason she never got a decent part again. Her next film, Excess Baggage, was absolutely execerable, and then she got cast as Batgirl in Batman and Robin. It was in no way her fault that that film was the train wreck that it was, but after that Silverstone clearly stopped being given good (or even decent) roles, and after appearing as Brendan Fraser's girlfriend in Blast From the Past, Silverstone was pretty much never seen in the movies again (at least until she got a supporting role in this year's Scooby-Doo sequel, another train wreck that was not her fault).

However, if you go back and watch Clueless again, you will find someone named Brittany Murphy playing the (supposedly somewhat dowdy) Harriet Smith role. At the time I first watched Clueless I didn't see anything special in her, and I would have been amazed to learn that she was the one who would have the career as a leading lady. You couldn't say that she has become a star, but she is being cast in leading roles in films today, which is a lot more than you can say for Silverstone. If she does become a star, it may be that her star making role was opposite Eminem in 8 Mile, in which she was indeed good. (If one wants to be extremely cynical about how Hollywood works, it has long been rumoured that one reason Silverstone's career failed was because she put on a little too much weight - ie she was a perfectly healthy woman rather than a Hollywood stick insect - and people became reluctant to cast her. Murphy on the other hand looks positively anorexic, so she has learned that lesson. I can't imagine where we got the idea that anorexic is attractive from, however).

And another case that I missed (departing from teen movies from a minute) actually came in Robert Redford's rather ponderous film adaptation of The Horse Whisperer. The original actress cast to play Kristen Scott Thomas' daughter in that movie was Natalie Portman. At the time, Portman was being named as a future star by almost everyone, after her performances in Luc Besson's Leon (aka The Professional) and the late Tedd Demme's Beautiful Girls (in which the then fourteen year old Portman managed to act everyone else in an ensemble cast consisting of about ten of Hollywood's best twentysomething actors completely off the screen). Portman backed out of that role in order to instead play Anne Frank on Broadway. Since them Portman's career has not taken off in quite the way many people expected. Taking the part of Princess Amidala in the three Star Wars movies has not turned out to be as great a career move as it might have initially appeared, particularly as these movies have crowded her out from some of the other parts she might have taken in here rather limited time she has had left to make movies while she has been studying at Harvard. She has appeared in occasional supporting parts (eg in Cold Mountain recently, but that is about it. Portman may well still become a major movie star, but it hasn't happened yet, and I really thought it would.

However, when Portman dropped out of The Horse Whisperer, she was replaced with another actress about the same age named Scarlett Johannson. When I saw the movie I acknowledged that Johannson was good, but I didn't think she was as good as Portman would have been. I didn't pick Johannson to be a future star at that point. (When I saw her in the Coen brothers' The Man Who Wasn't there in 2001 I did pick her as a future star, however. When she actually became one with the release of Lost in Translation last year, I wasn't surprised).

The Horse Whisperer also featured Kate Bosworth in a small supporting part. Here is another actress who is now showing signs of becoming a star. (She was great in Blue Crush). But that was another performance I missed pretty much entirely.

But it's a fun game to play.

Update: On the same theme, I wrote about my initial reaction to Reese Witherspoon compared to my reaction to Alicia Silverstone a bit over a year back here. Witherspoon's career has gone into a bit of a stall since I wrote it, however. Nothing huge - it's just that Legally Blonde 2 was a complete dog of a film and one good film now would fix that - but she doesn't look to be ascending to stardom in quite the way she did at one point.

Wednesday evening song lyrics

If the Volokhs can do it, so can I.

I can get up
On the right side of the bed
But that won't stop the rain
From coming down on my head
I can live my life
Playing hide and seek
But when I look inside
It's hard to make believe,
Ah ah

'n lately
You seem so far away
I wish I could say something
But I don't know what to say
I can feel your eyes
I don't have to look at you
Boy, discontentment
Is-a-sneakin' through

You never really want anything
But what you really need is everything
I'll give you something only life can bring
The calm inside the storm
Love me a little, love me long
Wo yeah
The calm inside the storm
Love me a little, love me long
Don't you know
You should be holding me
But you're all locked inside
Why don't you throw me your keys
I'm like a rockin' ship
On your rollin' sea
You know crash lightnin'
Never frightens me, nah

...You never really wanted
But what u really needed
I wanna give u something
mmm... the calm inside the storm
Love me a little, love me long
Love me a little, love me long

-- The Calm Inside the Storm, from Cyndi Lauper's second album True Colors (Third if you count Blue Angel).

(I so need an iPod).

Recovering

After a long flight (ie the one from England to Australia or vice versa), it normally takes me about a week to recover from jetlag. To adjust quickly, it is necessary to try to stay up as close to my normal bedtime as possible. In practice, this means staying up a couple of hours longer each day. However, the problem is that my body then attempts to wake up at what it thinks is the normal waking up time, and (with the later time at which I go to bed) this means that I sleep for fewer hours each day than normal, despite being exhausted when you I to bed. This means that for a few days I feel completely exhausted almost all the time. Eventually, though, my body takes note of the exhaustion and stops trying to wake up at its regular time.

This is where I have been for the last few days. However, I have just had a lovely ten hour sleep. Hopefully this means that I have reached the last stage and I am now pretty much okay. My body clock probably still needs to adjust by two or three more hours, but this will hopefully be relatively painless.

Redirection

I have a piece on internet terminals at Narita airport and healthcare funding over at Samizdata.

Saying goodbye

On my last day in Australia, my parents cooked me a barbecue in their backyard barbecue area. I have attended a great many barbecues in that barbecue area over the years, but this was likely the last. (My father has always used a wood fired barbecue, too. He will only be allowed a gas barbecue at his new place, and he intends to put one in as soon as he moves there). In any event, some T-bone steaks, and beef sausages, and wine, and beer were consumed. And it was good. However, after all the rushing around and working I did, I was exhausted. Which I think shows in the photographs.

I'm back in London

Modern air travel is truly miraculous. A couple of hours ago I was walking down Kings Road Chelsea. A typical London scene. Red double decker buses, English shops. You name it. However, on Friday I was having lunch with some friends in a restaurant with a lovely view of the Sydney Harbour Bridge. Between my being in the two places there is a kind of discontinuity - 24 hours of sitting in the back of cramped Boeing 747s. There is a memory of eating a bowl of Japanese noodles actually in Japan in the middle of it somewhere too. But the fact that two opposite ends of the earth lie at the end of the 24 hour discontinuity is quite amazing.

I need to sleep. More blogging when I wake up. (I have my laptop fixed and returned to me, which is a fine thing).

I seem to be getting to know Narita airport quite well

I am in the middle of a four hour layover after an overnight flight from Sydney. Not too bad - I think I got five or six hours sleep in the middle of it. There seems to still be free internet here, although not in the same place as before. This time it seems to be being offered by Intel, whereas last time it was Yahoo. I think there is also free wireless, but I don't know for sure because I do not have my own laptop with which to test it. It is quite irritating to be in the airport serving one of my favourite cities without being able to visit the city. Even despite that, I always like to take a stopover somewhere when I am travelling from Australia to or from Europe. Not this time, sadly. I haven't the time (nor, to be honest, the money). Anyway, that's life, I guess.

The end of a long, hard, but in the end perfectly pleasant trip

I am about to get on a plane and fly back to London. I should be there in a little over 24 hours. If the free airside internet cafe is still there at Tokyo Narita, I shall probably do a little blogging from there, as I have a four hour layover. It's that or the bar. I wonder if they take Singapore dollars.

Relatively feeble photopost

Australia's Gold Coast is one of those seaside areas with lots of residential towers with water views, beautiful beaches, warm weather and a leisure based economy based on retirees and tourists. The world leader in this kind of development is the southern Atlantic coast of Florida I believe, although I have never been there. In short, it is the sort of place full of shops like this.



Presumably a few Chinese and Japanese tourists do buy things like this, even at these sorts of prices.



I suspect it is a talking piece on the mantlepiece back in Osaka, if nothing else.

Ugh

Last Friday evening, I slept at my parents old home in Wollongong, south of Sydney.
On Saturday, I slept in a backpackers hostel in Sydney.
On Sunday, I slept in Wollongong again.
On Monday and Tuesday, I slept in my parents' new place on the Gold Coast (after an 1100km road journey pulling a trailer on Monday)
On Wednesday, I slept at my brother's home in Cessnock, north of Sydney (after an 800km road journey pulling an empty trailer).
This evening (Thursday), I will sleep at my sister's home in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney.
Tomorrow evening, I will sleep in Wollongong again.
On Saturday evening, I will (hopefully) sleep on an aeroplane.
On Sunday evening, I will sleep at my home in London.

Happy Birthday

Cecile Dubois, queen bee of the teen blogosphere, and Los Angelean proto-libertarian (we hope), is fifteen today. Happy birthday Cecile. Here's a photo I took of Cecile at a Samizdata bash before Christmas. That's her mum Cathy Seipp on the left, and Perry de Havilland can be seen just above Cecile's head. (I think that may be the back of Jackie D's head, too).

Explanations, and redirection

Since Monday I have driven from Wollongong to the Gold Coast (around 1100km) in a car with a trailer, spent a day on the Gold Coast where my parents are moving, and driven back to Cessnock where my brother lives (about another 800km). I only did about a third of the driving, but I am now exhausted.

In the middle of that, I did manage to post a quote of the day on Craig Stevens over at Samizdata.

Redirection

I have a piece on going to Telstra Stadium for oysters a football match over at Samizdata.

Geekery

Yesterday, I attended an Australian Rules football game at the former Olympic Stadium in Sydney. The game was enjoyable, although my team were a bit soft towards the end and lost, and the game was a little lacking in atmosphere. (Even in its reduced post-olympic form, the stadium seats 80000, and there were only 33000 at the game). After the game, I went into a bar outside the ground. Before getting in, a bouncer wanted to look inside my bag, presumably to check I was not carrying any other alcoholic drinks (or something).

"Can I check your bag".
(Assenting grunt). (Bouncer looks inside bag).
"Is that a Walkman"?
"No, it's a DVD-ROM drive".
"Okay, that's fine".

The DVD-ROM drive was bought for only A$25. (£10) in one of those little computer shops run by Chinese people that Sydney has in abundance. My Mum's computer does not have a DVD-ROM drive as it is a year or two old, and that is so cheap that I felt pretty much compelled to buy one to add to it.

Update: The DVD-ROM drive came from a well known company (Creative, who also are well known for their Soundblaster sound cards and who are also a distant number 2 in the MP3 player business behind Apple), but it was an old model. This had two disadvantages: the first is that the drive is 12x speed rather than the seeming current standard of 16x; the second is that the software it came with was for Windows 2000 rather than Windows XP. This explains the low price to some extent, as I had to find some appropriate XP compatible software before it would play DVDs. Now that I have done so and installed the software, however, the drive works just fine. Definitely a bargain.

Good news

My laptop has apparently been fixed and returned by Dell. Of course, it is in London and I am in Sydney. Given that I will have only occasional access to other computers for the next few days, it would be nice to have it with me. (Also, given that the whole point of getting a laptop is to have your computer with you when you go on trips like this one, it would be good to have it from that perspective, too).

Does this company get a lot of Terminator jokes?

Starbucksology

When Starbucks entered the Australian market in 2000, they charged a rather excessive 60c Australian for an extra shot of espresso. A tall latte cost $3.45, which meant that a double tall latte cost $4.05. In the competitive Australian cafe business, this seemed a bit excessive, and it wasn't too surprising that a few months later they cut the cost of a second shot to 25c, so that a double tall latte cost $3.70. Presumably Starbucks thought that they could thus sell more double shot coffees than before and make it up in the volume. (This strategy has been tried elsewhere. In the UK the price of a second shot was recently cut from 40p to 15p).

However, going into an Australian Starbucks yesterday, I discovered that the cost of an extra shot has been cut further. To zero. So a double tall latte now costs $3.45, the same as an ordinary tall latte. So Starbucks cannot now make it up in the volume. Ot at least they can't if all it does is cause people who would have ordered a single shot latte to now buy a double shot latte. Clearly to make it up in the volume they have to sell more cups of coffee in total. Which means that they presumably have to win business off their competition.

And competition appears intense. Australia traditionally had a more traditional southern European (actually Italian) coffee culture. Regular readers will know that I have thought that although Starbucks are successful in Australia, this traditional coffee culture might make it hard for chains of Starbucks clones to come into being the way that they have in other countries without traditional cafe cultures. However, I think I may have been wrong. Starbucks clones now are strongly in evidence in Australia, and the cafe culture is becoming Starbucksified. It may be the competition from such clones that has caused Starbucks to lower some of their prices.

But more on that tomorrow.

Ooh. I am so impressed. And I also would have used question marks and not exclamation marks at the end of the first line.

Obviously, in my tours of the great beer making countries of the world, never in my life have I seen such abundance.

Quick thoughts so I will have blogged something today

I finally managed a day yesterday in which I was not loading and unloading stuff from trailers, and instead managed to go to Sydney. The thing that I am really struck by is the extent to which Sydney is really a Pacific Rim city these days. In 50 years people are going to look back and wonder that Sydney was once not a Chinese city, as on current trends by then it will be at least as Chinese as is Singapore. Sydney would be dull and sleepy without this Chinese influx, and it does make the city much more exciting. And much more prosperous.

On the other hand, I think it is surprising that there are so few Indians in Sydney (and Australia generally). There are far more than there were even five years ago, although they are still almost absent compared to, say, London or even Singapore. (That said, I was having a couple of drinks with a friend of mine in a bar in a fairly posh Sydney hotel yesterday, and I kept glancing at the stunningly beautiful Indian woman at the next table). With the rise of India in the world, this must change surely, but the Indians have certainly given the Chinese a big head start.

Idiocy

Glenn Reynolds has already linked to it, but this essay giving a history of American drug prohibition is well worth a read. (In fact it is really good). The section about how cannabis came to be made illegal and got to be legally regarded as amongst the worst of drugs is particularly illuminating and simultaneously utterly hilarious.

The trouble with hacked together technology

I have been sending SMS messages from my mobile, using a local (Vodafone) SIM here in Australia, to a friend who is registered with the O2 network in the UK but who has been holidaying in Spain and whose phone is thus roaming. Some of them have been arriving instantly, and some have been taking as much as several days. I have also been sending messages to a few people in the UK. Some are getting through, but I am unsure about others. It could be that there is some latency there, but it could also just be that my friends are slack in replying.

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".