Still in La Coruña.

I'm feeling perfectly fine today. I went to bed at 7.30pm and got up at 9am, and after a croissant and a couple of cups of coffee I now feel just great. I am going to go see the second leg of the UEFA Champions league qualifier between Deportivo and Shelbourn (of Ireland) at the Riazor stadium this evening. Should be fun. I will try to blog something on ubersportingpundit after the event. I wonder how many Irish fans will be here? Not all that many I suspect, as getting here from Ireland is not all that easy, and at this time of year not especially cheap.

Oh yes. By the way, do any of my readers speak Spanish? If so, could someone tell me what the phrase "I paid for the first night when I checked in" would be translated into Spanish? This might be needed, as I had a little trouble communicating with a hotel receptionist this morning.

Now in La Coruña

However, my day has been completely wiped out by a migraine. In my case these are usually instense but fairly short lasting - a few hours only - so I should be okay tomorrow. But for now, I am going for a little lie down.

I continue to move west

I'm presently in Gijon. Between them, the two nearby cities of Gijon and Oviedo have about half a million people. I didn't realise that big an agglomeration was here, which is why of course it is a good idea to travel. I am by this point well off the normal Anglophone tourist circuit. We will see if it resumes when I get further along. Given that the second leg of a Champions League qualifier between Deportivo and Shelbourne will be played in A Coruna on Tuesday night, it is possible I will arrive in a city full of Irishmen. (And I suspect there will be tourists from further afield in Santiego de Compostela, and certainly in Porto). There are tourists here, but they are mainly Spanish. Still, nice beaches. Beautiful rugged country you come through to get here. Well worth a visit.

This truly does take the cake for "coddled students".

One day these people will get out into the cold harsh world and discover that it is not like this.

(Link via slashdot).

Update: Non-freshmen are resentful

Moving west

I am now in Santander in Cantabria. This is a seaside town which looks like it had ambitions a century ago to become the Cannes of the Atlantic coast of Spain. Clearly it didn't quite work out, and the town went into a bit of a decline. The interesting thing though is that this has now obviously reversed. The town still has a rundown decayed look in some ways, but the prosperity of the last 20 years in Spain has clearly had an impact, and although it is not the Cote de Azur, prosperous people clearly now come here. Interestingly enough, discount airline Ryanair are commencing flights here next month, so that will mean it will be in easy and inexpensive reach of 20 million people in the south east of England. If I was running a hotel here that would certainly make me happy.

Note to Ros

You really need to see more of Asia. Going to South America is good, though. I have never quite managed it.

Distractions

The plan on this trip was actually to fly into Bilbao, and to go west along the Galician coast, eventually ending up in Porto in Portugal. As it happens, none of the discount airlines fly out of anywhere between Bilbao and Faro along the coast, so the options were either to buy a ridiculously expensive one way fare on British Airways or to come back to Bilbao. Thus I have a return flight out of Bilbao in two weeks time.

Also, as I was planning the trip, I found myself slightly annoyed by a failing of mine last year. On that occasion, I saw lots of road signs leading pointing to Iruña, but did not realise that that is the Basque name for the city that is known in Spanish and to the world as Pamplona. Added to the fact that Pamplona is in Navarra, which (besides being famous for its wines) is traditionally Basque speaking but has a quite different history the country a little to the west (and is thus not part of the semi-autonomous Basque region today) and I could find a few good reasons for making a little detour east before going west.

On top of all that, the plane flew over San Sebastian on the way into Bilbao, and the beaches and islands and steep hills of that city looked so beautiful that I got an odd urge to go there. Therefore I spent yesterday afternoon in San Sebastian, the evening in the bars and restaurants of the city, and this morning came to Pamplona. San Sebastian is a gorgeous and glorious beach town, but in August that makes it something of a circus. Pamplona received an enormous influx of tourists in July for the running of the bulls, but is slightly saner in August. So I have been wandering around the city this morning. It looks culturally different, too. Whereas the Spanish national flag is not to be seen in Bilbao or San Sebastian, it is more visible in Pamplona. Here it is more a case of the Navarra, Spanish, and EU flags side by side. And I haven't seen the ikurriña, the Basque nationalist flag, although they are everywhere in the other two cities. One feels that although Navarra is certainly part of the larger territory that Basque nationalists feel should form a greater Basqueland, the Navarrans themselves are a little more ambivalent about it.

And I forgot to pack my power adaptor to allow me to charge my iPod, phone, and camera using European mains sockets. I put it on my pile of things to pack, but it seems it didn't go in my backpack. A helpful woman at the tourist office this morning suggested I try one shop. They didn't have adaptors, but they suggested another shop that did. So all is well.

Watching sport in a foreign country

There is something deeply surreal about sitting in a bar in Bilbao and watching Australian equestrians compete in the Olympics with the commentary in Spanish (or was it Basque). The downside is that there is a nasty tendency for people in bars to switch the television to uninteresting basketball games between Spain and Argentina when what you really want to watch is the swimming finals.

Well, it's a good thing I have the remains of an old Thinkpad to put it on



Okay, so I now get the point of the dock. You sit the iPod on it when you get home, and it simultaneously charges and pumps the music through the speakers of your sound system. Clever. Although it is a shame it comes with such a short power cable.

Update: While I was wandering around London this evening my iPod suddenly stopped playing music. I initially thought that the switch that locks the key pad was not working, but after looking at it carefully for a couple of minutes I discovered that the problem was actually that the software had crashed and the iPod was frozen. I knew there would be some way to reboot it but it wasn't obvious, and as it has an internally sealed battery there was no obvious way to simply disconnect the power. I therefore had to wait until I got home and then consult the manual. I then found out which combination of keys to hold down to reboot it, and once I had done this the iPod was fine.

But this was all a little declasse somehow. Crashing software is so, well, Microsoft. Apple have a classier reputation, somehow. (Which is not to say I haven't had Macintoshes crash on me at inopportune moments. I have of course).

Things change so fast

In my recent sabbatical / period of unemployment, I have often found myself in central Croydon in the day time. Wanting to either check my e-mail, blog something, or surf the web without going home, I have gone to the public library, that provides free internet access. However, the normal thing has happened that happens when you provide a "free" service: rather than being apportioned by price, the internet access has been apportioned by queueing. Normally you have to wait for ten minutes or so for your hour's internet access. This is in irritant, but I have genuinely not minded very much.

However, this afternoon I received a telephone call from the head of Smith Barney Citigroup's quantitative equity research team, offering me the job that I have mentioned obliquely in this blog that I have been interviewing for. Rather than being completely broke, I suddenly find myself with a sizeable income once again. My future boss told me that he would be e-mailing me some information, and I therefore needed to check my e-mail. I walked to the public library, and looked at the queue. Whereas thirty minutes earlier my response to the queue would not have been especially negative, I looked at a prospective ten to fifteen minute wait and the thought that went through my mind was essentially "fuck that". I walked a couple of blocks and went into a pay internet cafe for which I did not have to queue, which is where I am now. (Working for a large investment bank does that for you, I guess).

Once I have sorted a flight out, I am going to Spain and Portugal for a couple of weeks, where I intend to drink a lot of crianza. I am then starting the job at the start of September. I don't presently know what effect this will have on my blogging, although I suspect the volume will decline.

I will have to confess that I am relieved.

Update: I just impulse bought a 40Gb iPod that I can't can easily afford. I never impulse buy anything, but I am allowing myself an exception for this. (Except that it isn't really an exception, as I have been telling myself for months that I will get an iPod when I get a good job).

Security

As I thought might be the case, it has been confirmed that British SAS and SBS Special Forces troops are in Athens. There have been various comments from Greek and British government sources that they are there in a "consulting" capacity, and that they are providing "advice", although they are apparently there with a full complement of weapons and equipment. Why do I get the impression that if (heaven forbid) there is a terrorist attack on the Olympic Games in Athens, the "advice" might well consist of "Please get out of the way".

I am very pleased to hear that these guys are in Athens. The British SAS genuinely are the best in the world at this kind of thing, and I have no faith in the Greek army. I wonder where the nearest American aircraft carrier is to Greece right now? Perhaps quite nearby with a SEAL team and a substantial number of Marines handy?

When the olympics took place in Sydney four years ago, it was taken as a given that the Australian SAS where poised and ready for action. I was comfortable with this, becausee the Australian SAS are very good indeed. The Australian troops have essentially the same training as the British equivalent (and people move backwards and forwards between the two, I think) and they are troops I have great faith in when it comes to the crunch. (I believe that the Australian SAS excelled themselves in both Afghanistan and Iraq, and they have had fairly recent business in East Timor and the Solomon Islands, too). But the Greek equivalent, not so much.

The taste of childhood

I mentioned a couple of days ago that at least a portion of Australian expatriates in London essentially make up an "economically successful minority". We are basically talking professionals who live and work in London and probably make three or four times as much money as they could make at home. (Such are the rewards of living in a genuine world city). But of course if you grew up in Australia in certain ways, including at some times gut feeling, London never becomes home.

When one travels from one country to another life changes. And the little details of life change in unexpected ways. When you are in a place that is not the place that you grew up things like tastes and smells are different, and this always means that in some ways the place you are now is a little alien.

And part of this is the things that you find in the shops. Often they are almost the same, but not quite the same. This is especially the case for food items, and I think very especially the case with food items when you compare between Australia and anywhere else. Australia is a big place. The country features several climate zones. All manner of things are grown and made locally, and due to the tyranny of distance importing things is often more trouble than it is worth. In a lot of cases why really would you want to? The quality of the local product is usually extremely high.

When one lives in London one normally just gets used to it. There are subtle differences between the ingredients you use to cook food in London and the ingredients you use to cook food in Australia. You could slightly different food. It may be a little different but it isn't worse. It may once have been, but British supermarkets are now full of high quality ingredients.

But you still miss things. More than anything you miss the distinctive and most intense tastes of things that you regularly ate during your childhood. Often, this is the tastes of confectionary you ate when you were a child. And as there are in most places, there are particular types of chocolate bar and sandwich spread and other like things that are distinctive to Australia.

The Harvey Nichols department store in Knightsbridge has a certain noveau riche quality about it. I don't think it on the whole sells terribly interesting products (although there is plenty of good stuff sold there), but it has a certain catchet, and its management know how to cater to a certain clientele.



It is the sort of place that you expect to find footballers wives, hosts of reality television shows, and people who work in the public relations business, thinking that it is the height of sophistication to shop there. (Large portions of the television show "Absolutely Fabulous", were filmed in the store). I get the impression that newly rich expatriates might shop there for a while due to receiving recomendations from their secretaries, before moving somewhere a little more understated after being in London for a few years. (Harvey Nichols is certainly a place where actual Londoners shop, unlike nearby Harrods, which has been transformed into little more than a tourist attaction at this point). Selfridges is a much better store than either of them if you ask me. Being in Oxford Street possibly helps, as this is where normal people shop and they don't so much in Kinghtsbridge.

In any event, on the top floor there is a bar, a coffee bar, a kaiten-zushi restaurant, some other kind of restaurant the details of which I can't remember, and a wine shop (selling some very good stuff, including an excellent selection of Australian wines) and a food hall. Besides selling fresh and high quality meat, seafood, and fruit and vegetables, this also contains shelves of immaculately arranged packaged foodstuffs, most of them imported from interesting places and of high quality. Look at what it includes.



(Sorry about the variable quality photographs. The light was so-so, and I took the photos surreptitiously and quickly, as the proprietors of many stores do not like people taking photographs inside. As it happened nobody hassled me about it though).

And there's this:



(On previous occasions they had Mint Patties in the place that is half-heartedly filled with chocolate truffles. Disappointingly there weren't any today. I would prefer a Mint Pattie to a chocolate truffle any time).

And of course it is marvelous what a difference Milo makes (even if it is a crappy photo).



But despite all this, these are all peripheral to the key way in which Harvey Nick's sustains Australian expatriates in need.



All non-Australian readers in London with Australian friends should appreciate a key fact. If your friend is suicidal or just needs cheering up, the way to solve the problem is to go to Knightsbridge, and buy a packet of Tim Tams (even for £3.35), and give them to your friend. This will solve the problem immediately. Judging by the size of the Tim Tams section, I suspect that this is a major money making venture.



Amusingly, while I was there a young woman walked down that aisle, looked at the Tim Tams, looked at the price, and then took one packet off the shelf. She then looked like she was about to move away but the though "What the heck?" clearly went through her mind and she took a second packet off the shelf before heading to the cashier.

Oddly, though, I am not a huge fan of chocolate or sweet stuff, and although I will eat Tim Tams, they are not quite as effective on me as on most Australians.

What I would really like is a packet of Twisties. (They're the number one extruded snack, after all).

London today

The interview for the job for which I was learning the S+ went very well, and there is therefore a good chance that I will shortly be going to work in a quantitiative team in the equity research division of on of the world's largest banks. (Although one never knows, of course). The London based team I would be joining presently consists of a Greek, an Indian, a Romanian, a New Zealander, a Frenchwoman and (yes, really) and Englishman. I would be the only Australian in the team, but one of many working in financial markets in London. In fact, if things work out there will be two people I worked closely with in my last job in Sydney with who I will be working with occasionally, although they will be on different teams to me.

This is finance in London today. It has long been the case that the city is full of colonials from the ex-dominions, and for a few years the IT departments have been full of Indians, and we are now seeing the Indians spread to other parts of the businesses as well. And we are just beginning to see a few eastern Europeans. London is full twenty year olds with slavic accents working in basic service jobs, most who will probably be well paid professionals in a decade's time, and these are just starting to move up too. There have been eastern Europeans in IT departments for a while, too, although they are not as pervasive as Indians. They tend to be of type "guru" though, being concentrated amongst UNIX system administrators and things like that. The UNIX administrator who knows things about the operating system that no mere mortal should not know about, who is probably named Piotr or some variation thereof, and who has an accent that makes him sound like Count Dracula is something of a cliche in computer circles, and has been for a while. (The User Friendly comic stip parodies this cliche endlessly).

In any event, though, this is a sign of a broader trend, I think. Very international cities like London attract ambitious individuals from lots of places. The "economically successful minorities" from poorer countries tend to come in large numbers, too. Sometimes they do this because things get bad in the country they previously lived. Sometimes, though, I think they just come because it is simply less of a hassle to be a member of an economically successful group in a country where there are many economically successful groups (and where there is no poor majority group. And in a way there seems to be relatively little difference from groups who come from countries where they are an economically successful minority and those who come from somewhere like Australia, who come from countries with large middle classes and good educations systems, and who demonstrate a certain amount of initiative by self-selecting themselves and choosing to come in the first place. There is quite a distinct (and definitely prosperous) minority of Australians in London, who have, for instance, a reputation for being hard working. Getting responses like "Oh, he's an Aussie. That means he'll work hard" is definitely a good thing.

Redirection

I have a piece on a trip to a Cambridge pub, and a slightly surreal phone call over at Samizdata. Oh well. At least I know the frequency was 1800MHz.

Oooh

Roger Ebert has published another of my e-mails in his letters column. I have lost count how many times he has done this, but it is at least seven or eight I think. This time he only published to first part of the e-mail. I added some stories about buying Thunderbirds toys for children of friends of mine in Japan, but he doesn't appear to have had the space to print that.

Wednesday evening song lyrics

I never liked George Michael much
although they say he was the talented one.
Andrew Ridgley drew the map
that rescued me, took me to paradise

I was brought up to the sound of the synthesizer
I learned to dance to the beat of electronic drums
I came alive to the smouldering fire in your eyes
I love you now and I will till the day that I die

I had a tooth pulled as a child
I put it underneath my pillow
and when I looked the very next morning
There was a ten pound note

I took it to the nearest record shop
and put it down upon the counter
I've got to tell you what I know to be true
I bought my first record because of you

I was brought up to the sound of the synthesizer
I learned to dance to the beat of electronic drums
I came alive to the smouldering fire in your eyes
I love you now and I will till the day that I die

I loved everything
I loved to be around money
a daughter of negative equity
a child of Black Wednesday)

This is Sarah Nixey talking
Midi'd up and into the groove
I've got to tell you
what I know to be true

I didn't do too well at school
they said I couldn't concentrate
The day you flew off into the sunset
was the day my education was saved

then years later on Kensington High Street
I saw you drive a white convertible Golf GTI
carefully edging out into the traffic
just like a real live human being

I was brought up to the sound of the synthesizer
I learned to dance to the beat of electronic drums
I came alive to the smouldering fire in your eyes
I love you now and I will till the day that I die

Daddy lost everything
Our beautiful house
His beautiful sports car
His beautiful wife
I held his hand and told him
everything will be all right

This is Sarah Nixey talking
Midi'd up and into the groove
I've got to tell you
what I know to be true

I was brought up to the sound of the synthesizer
I learned to dance to the beat of electronic drums
I came alive to the smouldering fire in your eyes
I love you now and I will till the day that I die

I was brought up to the sound of the synthesizer
I learned to dance to the beat of electronic drums
I came alive to the smouldering fire in your eyes
I love you now and I will till the day that I die

-- Andrew Ridgley, from Black Box Recorder's third album Passionoia (2003). (Actually I think it is more Luke Haines speaking). And yes, I also remember 1992.

Redirection:

I have a Samizdata quote of the day on John Kerry. No time for any more blogging than that today.

Efficiency

At the request of a potential employer, I have been giving myself a crash course in the programming language S (the most common variants of which are named S+ and R, just to confuse people). I am an old C programmer, mainly, and this language is much higher level than that. Plus it is object oriented and more more function based than what I am used to. Still, this is quite impressive, and very easy to code.

qsort=function(a) if (length(a)<=1) a else c(qsort(a[a<a[1]]),a[1],qsort(a[a>a[1]]))

That's right, one line. Works for an array of any data type for which the logical comparison a<b makes sense, too.

Civilization

A new continental (or, more properly, just Belgian I think) style bar named the "Beer Circus" has recently opened in Croydon. It has around 15 Czech, Belgian,English (ie real ale) beers on tap, and over 150 bottled beers (mostly Belgian, but also a good selection of German and a few from other places).

Truly, a fine innovation. I asked the proprieter how long the bar had been open, and he said a couple of months, and that the business was doing very well.

Of course, it would be impossible for me to open such a bar in Sydney, as I would have to have a pub licence and these are finite in number and sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars each (thus meaning that if you have one, you have to open a huge soulless establishment also containing lots of slot machines to make a decent return on it). There would be no problem whatsoever if I wanted to open such an establishment in Melbourne, as former premier Jeff Kennett (who, whatever might be said for the man, didn't take any shit from anyone) reformed the laws a few years back.

No problem except for the logistical difficulties of importing the beer, anyway. If you want to run such a bar in London, you can stock it by driving a van to Belgium every now and then, filling it up with beer, and driving back. (Plus you have to then do some paperwork to make sure the appropriate taxes are paid). Doing that from Australia is a little harder.

Annoyances

Until recently, instant messaging has been dominated by programs such as MSN Messenger and Yahoo Instant Messaging. Until about a year ago I didn't bother with such programs, believing that real mean use IRC, or possibly the UNIX "talk" program. However, about a year ago, I gave in and started using these programs. (For anyone who is interested, I can be reached as "mjj12@btopenworld.com" on MSN Messenger, and "mjj122" on Yahoo instant Messenger).

Both these programs are based on centralised servers. There is a centralised database of information about you, and this centralised information also includes a contact list. When you log on from any computer in the world, your contact list is loaded onto your computer and appears on your screen. The downside is that the owner of the system has a centralised database of information about you, and that if something goes wrong with the server, you are screwed. Also, for high bandwidth communication such as voice (which these instant messaging programs also offer) going through a central server is perhaps not ideal from an efficiency point of view.

Which is why people on the internet have taken to Skype in a big was recently. Skpe is sold as principally a voice communication tool, with instant messaging as a secondary feature whereas earlier services have sold it the other way round, but I think a better way of looking at it is that Skype is the same sort of application with two things changed: firstly it uses a far better audio codec so the quality of voice communication is much better; secondly it is not centralised but is instead peer to peer; (thirdly it is also encrypted end to end, and this is good, but I think it is less important as a selling point).

The peer to peer part is good from the point of efficiency and privacy, but it causes one little foible. Because there is no central server, your contacts list can only be stored locally on your hard disk. (Also because there is no central server, the information that you have gone on or off line takes longer to reach all your contacts, as it has to propagate around the network to them via a non-direct route, too. Again, this is important but less of an issue than the first). This means that if you log on to Skype from a computer other than your usual one, you do not have your contacts list with you. Personally I have thre Skype installations in this room with me now: one on a laptop, one on the Windows partition of my desktop, and a third on the Linux partition of my desktop. (Another good thing about Skype is that the people behind it have done a Linux version, for which they have my sincere thanks). These have contacts lists consisting of different subsets of my actual list of contacts. I am slightly concerned about logging onto each and adding the same set of contacts again, because I think it may annoy my friends if they are asked repeatedly if I may add them as a contact. (Actually, if Skype is well designed then they will not be asked again, but I am not sure if it is in this regard).

The Skype people claim they are working on a solution to this type of problem. Hopefully this does not involve going back to the whole idea of a central server, but I fear it may. Thems the breaks, I guess.