One thing leads to another.

Okay, so you agree to build a custom made computer for someone else. You do actually order good quality equipment and components, but you want the resulting computer to look like a quality effort too, so you order a nice case rather than a cheap plastic one. As it happens, the online store from where you are buying most of the components has one for sale with a clear side, so that you can see the innards of the computer. Upon ordering this, you find that you are at a "suggested accessories" page at the online shop. The accessories are not expensive, so you order a couple. And when the parts all come, you put them together.

And that is how I managed to build a computer with one clear side, two glowing case fans, and an internal multicoloured fluorescent light.

Actually it's kind of cool. And it's a nice computer. I rather wish I had built it for me.

Wednesday Evening Song Lyrics. (Yes, I know it is Thursday).

I step off the train
I'm walking down your street again and past your door
But you don't live there any more
It's years since you've been there
But now you've disappeard somewhere like outer space
You've found some better place
And I miss you - like the deserts miss the rain
And I miss you - like the deserts miss the rain
Could you be dead?
You always were two steps ahead of everyone
We'd walk behind while you would run
I look up at your house
And I can almost hear you shout down to me
Where I always used to be
And I miss you - like the deserts miss the rain
And I miss you - like the deserts miss the rain
Back on the train
I ask why did I come again?
Can I confess I've been haning around your old address?
The years have proved to offer nothing since you moved
You're long gone
But I can't move on
And I miss you - like the deserts miss the rain
And I miss you - like the deserts miss the rain
And I miss you
I step off the train
I'm walking down your street again and past your door
But you don't live there any more
It's years since you've been there
But now you've disappeard somewhere like outer space
You've found some better place
And I miss you - like the deserts miss the rain
And I miss you - like the deserts miss the rain
And I miss you
And I miss you - like the deserts miss the rain
And I miss you - like the deserts miss the rain
The deserts miss the rain - like the deserts miss the rain
The deserts miss the rain
like the deserts miss the rain

-- Everything But the Girl, from their 1994 Album Amplified Heart, although it was actually a later remix of the song by Todd Terry that turned it into a hit.

More computers

Well, I am now blogging from the new PC I am building for my landlady. As this one has been built from new parts rather than recycled ones, it is rather more up to date than the PC I recently built for myself. This one has an Athlon XP 3000+, 160GB hard drive, 512 MB of RAM, DVD+/-RW, ATI Radeon 9200 128MB graphics, on board sound (but 5.1 sound with digital outs if needed), a nice set of 2.1 speakers, 802.11b wireless (for freeloading off my internet connection), a much cooler case than mine, and a few other things that I am not remembering right now. Unlike the computer I recently built for myself, this one has more legacy stuff like a floppy and a modem. This makes sense. If I need things like this, I can rush out and install them myself, but less technical people can't always do so. (Actually if I ever need a floppy, I have a USB floppy in the bottom of a box somewhere).

The computer is more or less assembled, although it is still sitting on top of my bed with its case open. Various things like case fans and internal lights need to be installed, but the hard work is done.

Redirection

I have a piece on the mystery of Selhurst railway station over at Transport Blog.

Houston, we have an operating system

Okay, I'm now blogging from SuSE Linux. The installation took a lot longer than a Windows installation, but once I got it started, it really wasn't especially painful. Using the KDE desktop environment now, which at least has a prettier default background than Windows XP.

The Linux installation process

Okay, I first attempted a network install of Debian. It took a while to find the image of a Boot CD that contained the right driver for my network card, but eventually I did.

I attempted to install Linux on my former laptop 2.5 inch hard disk, but halfway through the creation of new partitions, it kept telling me that it was unable to write to the disk, and then the disk vanished from the computer. Curious.

I then attempted to install Windows XP on the same disk, just to test if the problem was with the disk. Again, the process stopped halfway through, after which I the computer was unable to see the hard disk.

My thought at that point was that the 2.5 inch hard disk was faulty, but just as one last test of it, I installed it in my laptop and attempted to install XP on it while it was on the laptop. This worked fine, so presumably there is nothing wrong with the hard disk, and something wrong with the connection. I tried swapping my devices around between the two IDE ports on my motherboard, but no cigar. The 2.5 inch disk still wouldn't work. I can only conclude that the IDE cable I bought the other day is faulty. (I should have got one of those adaptors instead of a cable, even if the first shop didn't have one). A brief attempt to find the receipt for the cable so that I can either get another one or get my £5 back failed.

Okay, time to attempt to install linux on the main hard drive instead of the little one. For some unexplainable reason, I at this point decided to stop trying to install Debian and attempt to install SUSE instead. After an assortment of messing around with FTP sites and addresses, and eventually figuring out that ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/9.1 and ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/suse/i386/current do not in fact point to the same place, even though the documentation suggests that they do, the Linux installation is now going well, and I suspect I will have a running Linux box within a couple of hours. (Touch wood).

On the other hand, the piece of advice given on the Debian download site, which was "Use CD-RW and not CD-R" has turned out to be excellent advice, because I burned half a dozen different CD images before ending up with what I wanted, and using up six CD-Rs would indeed have been wasteful.

Redirection

I have a piece on a run-in I had today with George Galloway's European election campaign over at Samizdata.

I'm installing Linux

My computer has been trying to talk to my router and the screen has been telling me:

"Please Wait. Trying to get network configuration using DHCP/BOOTP... This may take a few minutes, be patient"

for, well, a few minutes. Perhaps I have the wrong driver for my ethernet card. I am not sure I am feeling especially patient though.

Redirection

I have a quote of the day from Nancy Reagan over at Samizdata.

Redirection:

I have a piece on Brian Lara's century in the West Indies v Bangladesh test over at ubersportingpundit.

Memories of Green

It seems that this is going to be the definitive image of me for some time. Oh well.

Fiddling with desktop computers

My old laptop was retired because of a really weird problem, which was that the computer would only start in exceptional circumstances. Most of the time when you pressed the power button it would whir for a moment and nothing more would occur, other than that a fan would keep spinning. (After a couple of hours the fan would then stop spinning). Sometimes if you left that fan to spin for a couple of hours and then tried to boot the machine again, the computer would then boot.

But usually it would not. And the time between successful boots steadily got greater, until the computer became essentially useless. And when it was working I would dread software crashes (which were not all that uncommon, given that it was using Windows ME) or anything else requiring me to reboot, because I never knew if the computer would come back up again.

But some parts of the computer were still okay. Just for the fun of it I recently removed the hard drive and installed it in my newer Dell laptop. Somewhat to my surprise, the Dell laptop proceeded to boot perfectly fine in Windows ME, which was what was on the hard disk. (It did complain a lot about the presence of hardware it did not recognise and wanted me to give it permission to search the universe for compatible drivers, however).

So, nothing wrong with the hard drive. One can't easily have two hard drives in most laptops, but now that I have a desktop computer as well, it is pretty easy to install the old hard drive in the desktop box. Although the actual IDE/ATA interface is the same, 2.5 inch drives use a different (44 pin) connector to the (40 pin) one used by standard 3.5 inch drives. (The 2.5 inch drive also incorporates the power - hence the extra pins - and the pins are smaller and closer together). Therefore I had to get an adaptor of some kind. I have seen adaptors that plug into the back of the hard drive and give the hard drive the larger connector, which can then plug into a standard size IDE ribbon cable, but I couldn't find any of those. However, the shop I went to did have an IDE cable with a large connector on one end and a small one on the other, which worked fine.

So I now have a computer with a 164GB main drive, a CD-ROM drive and a 5GB secondary drive. If I put it that way, it sounds completely pointless. However there are advantages in this. One is that I can now access all the files on the hard drive of my old laptop whenever I want. (There is something to be said for simply copying the entire contents of the little drive onto the big one, but I needed to mount the little drive to be able to do that). Another is that I can now boot the desktop machine in Windows ME from the second drive. (Is that a bug or a feature?) The third is that I actually have two hard drives. I could for instance install linux on the little drive, and that way I would have a dual boot system without having to mess around with partitioning the main hard drive.

And when I say little drive, I do mean it. 2.5 inch drives are much thinner, and they really do only take up a tiny fraction of the volume of 3.5 inch drives. I have never seen a 1.8 inch drive, but we are talking tiny. (As for a one inch drive, imagine a Compact Flash card).

Update: What is annoying is that the cable I bought yesterday only has two data connectors: one (40 pin) for plugging into the main board and another (44 pin) for plugging into a 2.5 inch drive. This means that if I use this cable, I can only attach one device (the 2.5 drive) into that IDE port. IDE ports are capable of connecting two devices (a master and a slave) and normal IDE cables have three 40 pin connectors, to allow two devices to be connected to the board via one cable. I now have my main hard drive and my CD-ROM connected to one IDE port and the 2.5 inch hard drive to the other. If I want to add another IDE device (eg a DVD+/-RW drive) I can't unless I get a different adaptor or cable. (Also, I would really prefer the main hard drive to and the CD-ROM drive to both be masters connected to different IDE ports, which is more efficient. But for now, that's how it is).

New developments

Toshiba have just announced a 60GB two platter version of their 1.8 inch hard drive, most famously found in the full size Apple iPod. Presumably there will also be a 30GB one platter version. Apple are also expected to announce a fourth generation iPod in a few months, which will have a colour screen on which you can display digital photographs, a more sophisticated operating system and a few other features. It will be interesting to see what the iPod evolves into. I doubt that that many people will use 60GB of storage, but there are lots of other features you could add while you keep the same form factor. Maybe the full size iPod is going to evolve into a PDA, or maybe Apple will find a clever way to make it a mobile phone as well, or various other thoughts. (Apple has been adding more features to subsequent models anyway). I think the trick is to keep the form factor, keep the music interface the same, and provide other functions as add ons that are easy to use but which do not affect the core functionality. Before long there will be higher capacity versions of either the 1 Hitachi drive used in the iPod mini or of Toshiba's 0.8 inch drive. Once we can get an iPod mini with a capacity of 15GB or so (as a guess, this will be two generations of product down the line - another 18 months or so) the iPod mini is likely to satisfy most people who just want a music player, so the thing that sells the full size version (if anything does) is going to be other applications. And this 60GB disk is something that is helping Apple go that way.

And of course one great thing about the iPod is that it is really pushing development of those small hard drives. If you decide you are going to build a laptop based on the full powered Pentium M CPU, a 14 inch screen, and a 2.5 inch hard drive (which is what most laptops are), you end up with a machine weighing five pounds or a little more and which looks like this. Most laptops are approximately thus (with another family based on 15.4 inch widescreens instead). The maximum specification of such laptops at present is a 2.0GHz Pentium M, and a 100GB hard drive, as this is as fast as Pentium Ms come and as big as 2.5 inch hard drives come. Having built such a computer it is hard to miniaturise, as it requires a fair bit of power (and consequently a fairly big battery) to run. If you want to build a smaller and lighter laptop you have to use a smaller and lighter battery, so you need to choose smaller or less powerful components.

As it happens, Intel has also released lower power variants of the Pentium M. Actually the chip comes in three varieties: there are the standard versions, the low voltage versions and the Ultra Low Voltage versions. I haven't noticed the low voltage versions so much, but the Japanese manufacturers have been doing all sorts of interesting things with the Ultra Low Voltage version. Readers of this blog will know I am sadly much enamoured with the Sony Vaio TR series. This is a laptop based around the ULV Pentium M, Toshiba's 1.8 inch hard drive, and a 10.6 inch WXGA screen that Sony has sourced from somewhere. The good thing about this machine is that it is just about the smallest and lightest laptop you can get that includes an optical drive. (Fujitsu has a very similar machine that is available only in Japan). The first version of this laptop included a 0.9GHz Pentium M, a DVD-ROM/CD-RW drive, and a 30GB hard drive. The most recent version includes a 1.1GHz Pentium M, a DVD-RW drive, and a 40GB hard drive. I suspect that Sony will release another new version as soon as it can source a reasonable number of the 60GB Toshiba drives, at which point the TR series will have a 1.1GHz CPU and a 60GB hard drive. That's a little behind a typical larger laptop in terms of processor power, but otherwise it really isn't bad.

I want one.

Frustration

I had a couple of interviews today, for a really good job. I thought I did really well on the first one, but on the second I did less well. I didn't do a terribly great job of answering some questions on differential equations I should have done a better job of answering. (This was stuff I knew well a decade ago, but on which I was rusty, and I didn't start thinking clearly until the end - and of course the answer to one of the questions popped into my mind fifteen minutes after the end of the interview). What I managed to avoid doing was panic and start talking really fast as I have been known to do in the past. (The worst thing you can do in such circumstances is show fear, and at least I didn't do that). Still, I don't think I will get any further with this job. (Of course, I don't yet know).

Damn. I think I really got close.

Wednesday Evening Song Lyrics

I came across a cache of old photos
And invitations to teenage parties
"Dress in white" one said, with quotations
From someone's wife, a famous writer
In the nineteen-twenties
When you're young you find inspiration
In anyone who's ever gone
And opened up a closing door
She said: "We were never feeling bored

'Cause we were never being boring
We had too much time to find for ourselves
And we were never being boring
We dressed up and fought, then thought: "Make amends"
And we were never holding back or worried that
Time would come to an end

When I went I left from the station
With a haversack and some trepidation
Someone said: "If you're not careful
You'll have nothing left and nothing to care for
In the nineteen-seventies"
But I sat back and looking forward
My shoes were high and I had spots
I'd bolted through a closing door
I would never find myself feeling bored

'Cause we were never being boring
We had too much time to find for ourselves
And we were never being boring
We dressed up and fought, then thought: "Make amends"
And we were never holding back or worried that
Time would come to an end
We were always hoping that, looking back
You could always rely on a friend

Now I sit with different faces
In rented rooms and foreign places
All the people I was kissing
Some are here and some are missing
In the nineteen-nineties
I never dreamt that I would get to be
The creature that I always meant to be
But I thought in spite of dreams
You'd be sitting somewhere here with me

'Cause we were never being boring
We had too much time to find for ourselves
And we were never being boring
We dressed up and fought, then thought: "Make amends"
And we were never holding back or worried that
Time would come to an end
We were always hoping that, looking back
You could always rely on a friend

And we were never being boring
We had too much time to find for ourselves
And we were never being boring
We dressed up and fought, then thought: "Make amends"
And we were never being boring
We were never being bored
'Cause we were never being boring
We were never being bored

Being Boring, from the Pet Shop Boys' 1990 album Behaviour

Update: I will confess that this is one of my favourite songs. However, my feelings for it are clearly mild compared to those of some people. For when I was googling for the lyrics, I found that someone else had created a 150 page website devoted purely to this one song.

The multicultural world

This evening I had another interview for a job with a bulge bracket American bank. (The financial markets are hiring - this is good). Of course, in this globalised world, it is remarkable how much you have in common with the people you encounter. The interviewer knew someone who had been studying for a Ph.D. in the same department at me in Cambridge at the same time. And as he was Indian, we had much in common. No doubt I could have talked cricket with him for hours.

The joys of copyright

Over in the comments section of Cathy Seipp's blog (where Cathy's daughter Cecile Dubois was guest blogging), I this afternoon found myself having a conversation with Tim Minear (who wrote many episodes of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer spinoff Angel) about the forthcoming DVDs of the recent television series Wonderfalls, which despite great reviews was cancelled after only a few episodes early this year. Apparently one obstacle to getting the DVDs out is some of the songs used in the television series: the producers do not have the rights to for the music as it applies to a DVD release, and obtaining it would be too expensive, so the music has to be removed from the television episodes and it has to be replaced with less expensive music.

Tim says that this is quite a common situation. Given the way in which music copyrights work, I can believe this. In particular recorded music is subject to two copyrights, one belonging to the composer and the other to the performer. The copyright of the performer (ie the record company) is much more restrictive than that of the composer (ie the publishing company), which means that the performer can charge whatever he wants to allow use of the song, and can prevent its use if he doesn't want to. The copyright of the composer is subject to compulsory license, however, which means that the composer cannot stop use of the song, and cannot choose how much to charge for it - this is set by the copyright laws. This is why you will sometimes hear a new version of a familiar song on a movie soundtrack - it means that the producers were unable to obtain rights to the music they wanted to use and therefore had someone else record a new version of the same song, which nobody can stop them doing but which can be much cheaper). And in many instances the copyright law that applies to the broadcast of music is not the same as that that applies to selling recordings of music.

Which reminds me of another, older, example of this. It applies to the radio rather than television, for which the rules are different again, so it's not quite the same kind of thing, although it's close.

Shortly after Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio series was broadcast in the UK in 1978, the producers wanted to put the series out as an LP record. (The CD player existed in labs in Eindhoven at that point, but was not yet a consumer product). This was offered to BBC records, who in one of many acts of legendary cluelessness passed, but another record company picked it up.

Copyright law contains various provisions for the broadcast of music on the radio. In some instances it falls under fair use, and in other instances compulsory licences apply. In any event, it was relatively easy to use quite famous music for the radio series, but it was legally much harder if you were going to put it on a record. Resources were limited in terms of paying for the rights to use music on the record, and it thus wasn't possible to release recordings of the original radio series including the original music. Also, the original series had 29-30 minute episodes, and you can only fit 22-23 minutes on one side of an LP record. So the radio series was remixed with different music, cut in length, and substantially rerecorded for its release on LP. There are many mutually contradictory versions of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and the LP records are one of the more obscure ones. They weren't especially obscure at the time - in fact they sold very well - but they are something of a collector's item now due to the fact that records are now an obsolete medium. The Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy was later released on CD, but this time actually by the BBC. This time round there was a lot more money, and it was possible to obtain the rights to all the music of the original radio series (and there is no difficulty fitting two 30 minute episodes on a CD, given that CDs fit a maximum of 74 minutes of recording). So the CDs were (and are) of the original radio series, not the remixed and rerecorded LP record version.

Most people would agree that this is for the best: the radio series was the original and in some ways definitive version after all. This is possibly true, but in a way it is also a shame that the LP versions have faded into obscurity (although they are something of a collector's item). For they are actually very good. The radio programs were a bit rushed, but for the LP versions there was time to fix a few things that had not been got right the first time. And in one or two places this shows. So if you are a serious Hitchhiker's collector (I'm not) you probably do need a set of the LPs.

And it really seems necessary to find a set of the LPs to listen to this version. Because although it is easy to find MP3s of the original radio series (ie ripped versions of the CDs) it is not for the LP versions. As programs that originally went out on vinyl records and which have never been released in digital format, they are a little hard for people to rip.

Update: A little further reading informs me that episode three of Hitchhikers released on CD does contain a brief cut due to the the difficulty of obtaining the rights to Shine On You Crazy Diamond by Pink Floyd and Rock and Roll Music by the Beatles. (I doubt that obtaining the rights to Also Sprach Zarathustra would be difficult, although this is also mentioned in the article).

More breakfast blogging

Nominally Italian pancetta and parmesan sausages this week once again from the Sainsbury's luxury sausage line. Unsurprisingly they are less garlicky and more cheesy than the Tolouse sausages I had last week. (I would attempt to make some comment about how that describes the differences between Italy and France, but France is plenty cheesy too. The pancetta and parmesan sizzled a little more in the pan, perhaps mainly because of the cheese. In any event, they were quite delicious, even more so than the Tolouse sausages I think.

My new computer

Over the last six months, I have on two occasions hit problems due to the fact that my laptop computer has died. The first time the machine was a complete writeoff, and I had to simply buy a new one. The second time my new laptop had problems with its screen, and I was without it for several weeks while it was being repaired by Dell. For me, being without a computer is disastrous, as most of the things I do in my life require one to really function. I decided I needed a second computer to act as a backup in such situations. I had never built a computer out of a motherboard and other parts before, and I decided that it would be fun to try. And as it happens, a great many computer people have old computer parts lying around, and by asking nicely you can get most of the parts for a new computer for free.

In particular, I discovered that the best kinds of friends to have are hard core gamers - people who must have the latest and greatest computer at all times, and who are likely to throw out or give away computer hardware that seems perfectly good and reasonably up to date to the rest of us.

In the end, I managed to get people to give me almost an entire computer. As far as hardware is concerned, I only ended up paying for a new toolkit (which doesn't really count and which I needed anyway and which in any event only cost me £7.49), a set of screws, a new keyboard, and a new hard drive. (My mother gave me a keyboard when I was in Australia, but I left it out as I was carrying a bit too much luggage. I could undoubtedly have scrounged one off someone else, but when I saw that Maplin Electonics were selling brand new keyboards for £4.68, it simply didn't seem worth bothering). As far as hard drives are concerned, I discovered that second hand ones are harder to come by than most other components (as hard drives fail more often than virtually any other component, and there is thus more demand for them than for anything else) and also because hard drives are the part of the computer that is more subject to Moore's law than any other. Three or four year old hard drives only tend to be 5-10 gigabytes, and this isn't really enough for people with large music collections. (Mine is presently 14GB, which is medium sized but too much for a 10GB hard drive). On top of that, I might well do something like install a TV card and turn this computer into a Personal Video Recorder (PVR) at some point, in which case lots of hard drive space will be useful.

So although it might have been possible to scrounge a small second hand hard drive from someone (or I could have got an adaptor and used the 5Gb hard drive from my old laptop) I didn't think it was worth it. And once you have made the decision to buy a new hard drive, it turns out that 160GB costs less than double the cost of 40GB. So, the new computer has a 160GB hard drive. (I am told that the drive has a capacity of 164,686,520,320 bytes out of which I am presently using 3,781,287,936, so I have mere 160,905,232,384 bytes of space remaining).

Everything else was given to me by people who weren't using it. And I have been able to convert this



into this

.

In any event I now have a computer with an AMD Athlon 1GHz CPU, 512MB of RAM, a 160GB 7200rpm hard drive, a 128Mb NVIDIA GeoForce4 Ti 4200 Graphics card (although this is being slowed down a little by the fact that the motherboard only has a 4X AGP slot, and the graphics card supports 8X), 10/100 Ethernet, on board sound, and a CD-ROM drive. There's no modem and no floppy, not because I would have had any trouble getting them but because I don't need them right now. (On the other hand if someone wants to give me a modem for free, I might take it, because it is useful to have one on board in case the DSL fails. That said, I do have one in the laptop, so to be in a bad way I would have to lose both the DSL and the laptop would have to have a separate problem, which isn't that likely).

And the computer is in an enormous case. Gamers like those I believe. I might install some front USB ports in one of the bays at some point, and an internal card reader might be nice, too.

Just using it now, to me the new box feels like a nice computer. The least state of the art thing about it is probably the CPU. I think the 1.0GHz Athlon precedes AMD's use of the "Athlon 1700+" notation, but I according to benchmarks a 1.0GHz Athlon is likely to run at about 2/3 of the speed of the 1.4GHz Pentium M in my laptop, and about 10% slower than a 1.3GHz Pentium 4. So the CPU is not state of the art, but is more than acceptable for most uses. And with 512MB of RAM, it isn't going to have to do much swapping. The one thing that is lacking is a DVD drive of any kind or a CD writer. I don't expect I am going to want to watch DVDs on this computer anyway (I have a standalone DVD player on the other side of the room) whereas a DVD player on a laptop is really useful for watching DVDs in places where one doesn't otherwise have a player) but it somehow feels incomplete. Perhaps I should have bought another of those $A25 DVD-ROM drives in Australia when I had the chance.

In actual fact I will add a DVD+/-RW drive when I have a little more money. At that point I will have a really nice computer, I think, and it really has cost not much at all.

Redirection

I have one of my long pieces about Hollywood over at Samizdata.

How to cheer oneself up in stressful times

Roast Duck with plum sauce. Mmmmmm. Duck.

I love ducks. They are such cute birds. I love the way they sort of glide across the water, and it looks so elegant, but you watch them go underneath you when you are standing in a bridge and you then see this circular paddling motion with their back legs. (Not that birds have front legs of course). Also, they are delicious.

Redirection

I have a piece on Porto's victory in the European Champions League over at ubersportingpundit.

Wednesday Evening Song Lyrics

Thank you for hearing me
Thank you for loving me
Thank you for seeing me
And for not leaving me
Thank you for staying with me
Thanks for not hurting me
You are gentle with me
Thanks for silence with me

Thank you for holding me
And saying "I could be"
Thank you for saying "Baby"
Thank you for holding me

Thank you for helping me
Thank you, thank you for helping me

Thank you for breaking my heart
Thank you for tearing me apart
Now I've a strong, strong heart
Thank you for breaking my heart

Thank you for Hearing Me, from Sinead O'Connor's 1999 album Universal Mother.

(I've been listening to O'Connor's Best of album, and I am stunned by just how wonderful it is. O'Connor became famous briefly more than a decade back for her heartbreaking cover version of Prince's Nothing Compares 2 U, but then didn't become the huge star that she should have become, possibly because of her overwhelming urge to repeatedly denounce the Pope, and other fairly bizarre behaviour. But she really can sing like an angel).

The multicultural world

This evening I had a telephone interview for a job with a bulge bracket American bank. Although the job would likely be in London, the person interviewing me was in New York. And of course, in this globalised world, it is remarkable how different from you the people you encounter are. Whereas I was from New South Wales and studied at the Universities of Sydney and Cambridge, he was from Victoria and had studied at the University of Melbourne and MIT. I mean, what an extraordinary lack of cultural reference points we had. We wouldn't even use mean the same thing when we used the word "football"

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.