Musing on the Minnows

Yesterday Michael discussed the prospects of the strong cricketing nations. The winner of the 2007 World Cup will almost certainly come out of those teams. It would be a massive upset if they did not.

However there are eight other participants in the tournament. This is a change for the World Cup- in the past, the minor cricketing countries did not play a great role in these tournaments. As recently as the 1992 tournament, only one participant was not a serious contender.

This more inclusive style of tournament is not to everyone's taste- both Michael Holding and Ricky Ponting have come out against it. Both men have played in winning World Cup sides and may approach the tournament from the point of view of the players- they want the best to go up against the best.

But minnows have been present in every tournament, and the 1975 minnow Sri Lanka grew into the 1996 World Cup Champions. While it is hard to imagine Bermuda or Holland ever becoming a serious contender, it is possible that one day Kenya or even Canada could develop into serious cricketing nations. This is why ICC likes to include them.

And, given their resources, I think that the minnow nations have a good enough record to justify their inclusion. The 1975 Sri Lankans did well, although they didn't win a game in the tournament; in 1983, Zimbabwe won their first ever World Cup game against Australia. In 1992, Zimbabwe were again competitive and won their game against England, who came runners up.

In 1996 came the biggest shock, when Kenya beat West Indies; 1999 brought Bangladesh's victory over Pakistan, and in 2003 there were no end of suprises- Canada beat Bangladesh, and notably, Kenya beat Sri Lanka and manged to make the semi-finals.

In 2007, there is some scope for upsets. Each pool consists of two minnows and two major nations, so there is a total of 16 games between minnows and majors. Of course, some victories would not be as surprising as others. Bangladesh have improved markedly in the past few years and if they beat either India or Sri Lanka it will be more an 'upset' then a 'boilover'.

Group C and Group D have mixes of nations that could cause upsets; both England and Pakistan have the sort of erratic form that leaves them vulnerable if a minnow nation catches them on a bad day.

And if by chance a minnow makes the 'Super 8' there is a chance of more boilovers.

So while the 'big boys' will fight it out for the 2007 World Cup, I think that the presence of the minnow nations is a positive for the tournament, adding to its entertainment value. Tonight, Kenya play Canada, a contest that Kenya should win. But it isn't a sure thing, and it should be more of a contest then Australia's match against Scotland.

But then Australia's form has been bad lately. Scotland beating Australia at cricket seems totally unthinkable, but they'll never get a better chance then tonight. Game on!

Welcome to my World Cup blogging

Here are my brief portraits of the eight "good" sides in the cricket world cup that began today. I have a few more thoughts on Samizdata.

• The West Indies are hosts of the tournament. The English speaking countries of the Carribean have fielded a single cricket team for about 80 years. This team slowly rose through the ranks of cricketing nations for its first decades of existence, and was extremely competitive from around 1960. In the mid 1970s it rose still further, and through having great fast bowlers and spectacular batsmen it dominated international cricket until the early 1990s. Since then it has suffered many defeats, but the team still contains some very impressive players. In full cry, present West Indian captain Brian Lara is one of the most awe inspiring players in world cricket. However, there are questions about his and the team's attitude. One sometimes thinks the players would rather visit nightclubs than cricket grounds. The West Indies will probably flame out at some point, but they may well play some great cricket before doing so. If they make the later stages of the tournament, this may concentrate their minds well enough to do well in those later stages.
• Australia are the defending champions, and are attempting to win the tournament for the third time in succession and the fourth time in total. Australia have lost a number of good players since the last World Cup, and have several injuries to key players. The lost of fast bowler Brett Lee is a big blow. Andrew Symonds and Matthew Hayden are important players, but will be back hopefully fit in time for the later stages of the tournament. Australia's batting is strong regardless of this, with Adam Gilchrist and Hayden destructive at the top of the order, Ricky Ponting in the middle order, and Sydmonds and Michael Hussey as finishers. However the bowling looks weak. Glenn McGrath (playing in his last tournament) was a great player but is not any more. Stuart Clark is a fine test bowler, but is untested in one day internationals. Andrew Symonds is unlikely to bowl much due to his injury. Brad Hogg is an effective spinner (and played a big role four years ago) but is curiously out of favour with the selectors and is low on confidence. Australia have lost their best finishing bowler in Lee. In truth though, Australia's middle over bowlers lost the plot about a year ago. Sides with decent batting can score an outrageous number of runs between the 20 and 45 over marks when Australia are batting. This has been obvious for at least a year, but team management has carried on as if there is no problem. Australia have been thoroughly found out in recent games, and go into the tournament having lost five games straight. They are very vulnerable to smart opposition who can outthink them and take advantage of the conditions. Although Australia are still favourites with bookmakers (although their odds have lengthened considerably over the last couple of months) I do not expect Australia to make the semi-finals. I hope I am wrong, but I do not really believe I am. It is almost beyond description how much I wish Shane Warne were playing.
  
• South Africa are second favourites with bookmakers, and have by far the best form of any team coming into the tournament, having destroyed Pakistan and India at home in their most recent series. Their batting side is very impressive, with players like Jacques Kallis, Graeme Smith, and Herschelle Gibbs having taken them to very large scores in recent games. Their bowling is good, but relatively unimaginative, being based around pace. This may not suit them in the West Indies. Their captain Graeme Smith is rather unimaginative and not a greet tactician. If there is a side that is going to power through the tournament and win it easily, the the South Africans are it. However, they stand to be surprised by a side that out thinks them at some point. If this happens prior to the semi-finals, it does not matter, as they should make the semi-finals easily enough with their present game. If it happens in the semi-final or final, they lose. History does not help. They have often played well at early stages of previous tournaments, but have then been out thought, out sledged, and overwhelmed by the occasion later on. And I am not sure what to make of their ability to be eliminated from previous world cups in truly bizarre circumstances, other than to see it at a tremendous source of amusement. They cannot possibly beat the previous world cup, in which they were eliminated after a rain shortened game was tied on the Duckworth-Lewis rule after the captain got his calculations wrong. Or can they?
  
• New Zealand are a side with a history of making the most of rather limited resources. Cricket is a very poor relation to rugby in New Zealand, which is a small country. None the less, its cricket team has a history of being very well captained and coached. In World Cups it has often played very well early in the tournament, but upon reaching the semi-finals the lack of depth and the lack of really top notch players has showed. The present side fits this description well Captain Stephen Fleming is the best captain in world cricket (and a good batsman). All rounder Jacop Oram has been playing superbly recently, and the middle and lower order have been batting with a wonderful never say die attitude. (New Zealand come into the tournament having beaten Australia 3-0 at home). Shane Bond is one of the great tragedies of modern cricket: a wonderful, technically correct seam bowler who would be one of the best bowlers in the world if injuries had not shortened his career. The conditions in the West Indies will suit him, and he will once or twice take five wickets and win a game for New Zealand. However, he is only allowed to bowl ten overs and the rest of New Zealand's bowling may not be good enough to finish the job. The Australia v New Zealand game from four years ago probably summarises the problem. Bond took 6/23 and reduced Australia to 7/84, but he was not allowed to bowl any more overs and Australia recovered to 208 and won the game easily. That kind of thing may happen again. New Zealand will make the semi-finals, but probably don't quite have the class to win the tournament.
  
• Sri Lanka revolutionised one day cricket with their performance in winning the 1996 World Cup, in which the quality of their batting and their strategy of attacking from the first ball when fielding restrictions in place surprised much of the rest of the cricketing world. (It shouldn't have, because they had been playing the strategy effectively for at least six months going into the tournament). It also marked their transition from the easybeats of world cricket to a powerful, dangerous side. Since then they have beaten and embarassed a lot of other teams, have annoyed and frustrated a lot of opposing players with their ruthless and forceful attitude to the game, and have caused considerable controversy by selecting spin bowler Muttiah Muralithuran, whose bowling action is considered by many to be of questionable legality. Still. they are a smart and canny side who can exploit difficult batting conditions. Whatever the merits of his action, Muralithuran will be a dangerous bowler in these conditions. Jayasuriya is back in the side for one final swing at the World Cup. There is plenty of batting talent in the side such as captain Mahela Jayawardene, Marvan Atapattu, and Kumar Sangakkara. Sri Lanka are going to be very dangerous indeed in this tournament. I wouldn't be very surprised if they won it.
  
• Not much can be said about Pakistan other than that they are Pakistan. They produce a large number of greatly talented and exciting players. However, the players seldom appear united on the field. They have an endless series of match fixing scandals, drug scandals, dressing room rebellions, weird political intrigues involving corrupt government ministers, and goodness knows what. Going into the world cup, the most recent problem is a drug scandal (steroids). Pakistan also lack the bowling strength of a few years back. There is nobody of the talent of Wasim Akram or Waqar Younis. The most exciting bowler than do have is Shoaib Akhtar, who was involved in the doping scandal, was "acquitted" and is now out "injured". In their most recent series Pakistan were horribly beaten by South Africa. The only captain who could ever make Pakistan play as something resembling a united team was Imran Khan, who took them to World Cup glory in 1992. Many of us have fond memories of a very young Inzamam al Haq playing spectacular shots under the MCG lights in that tournament. Inzamam is today captain of Pakistan, and in the years since has been consistently one of the world's finest batsmen. However I cannot sensibly see Pakistan overcoming their problems to get far in this tournament. On the other hand, sense and the Pakistan cricket team seldom seem to go together.
  
• India are the great enigma of world cricket. They won the World cup completely unexpectedly in 1983, when unbackable favourites the West Indies failed in the final . That inspired a huge party in India in response, but that would be nothing compared to what would happen if they did it in these days in which modern media and economic growth has drenched India in cricket to an extent that is hard to describe. India have great batsmen in Sachin Tendulkar, captain Rahul Dravid, Virender Sehwag, and fine spin bowlers in Harbhajan Singh. Their seam bowling is perhaps a little weaker and I am not sure they are a great tactical side, but if everything comes off they are likely to be extraordinarily likely to beat. They have a frustrating inconsistency about them, however. Some days (particularly in test series against Australia) they can be brilliant. In others deeply disappointing. Their form is mixed going into the tournament: they have recently beaten South Africa and the West Indies, but were badly beaten by South Africa over Christmas. That was in very different conditions though. I think if India get momentum going, they will be hard to stop. but it is very questionable whether they will get momentum going.
  
• And last, England. England are widely being predicted as being a dark horse in the series. after playing utterly terribly for most of the Australian summer, England turned around at the last possible moment in the Commonwealth Bank series, winning four games straight to take the tournament. The return of captain Michael Vaughan appears to make a huge difference to England. With him they believe in themselves. Without him they do not. Generally, though, England are well led, fit, and well coached. They played outstandingly to win the Ashes about 18 months ago.
  
  That is the rub, however. Other than the last four matches, England's good performances in recent years have come in test cricket. In one day cricket, they have generally been terrible. I do not think they have enough tactics, enough game planning, and enough skill in one day games to win the tournament. Perhaps they will make the semi-finals. I think though that strategically better teams will come through in the end.
  
  On the other hand, Vaughan is a very good captain. And the conditions will suit Monty Panesar. So who knows?
  

That is team by team analysis. Who do I think will win? Okay. Predictions.

Semi-finalists: South Africa, New Zealand, Sri Lanka, and India.
Finalists: South Africa and India
Champions: South Africa

However, the tourament is the most open I can remember. In the last five minutes I have changed the side I have predicted to win from Sri Lanka to India to South Africa. I really have no idea.

Korean petrol advertisement

DSCF0917
Originally uploaded by mjj122.

What is there to say. Impressionism. Pretty Korean girl. Petrol. How could I not associate the three already?

Nearly out of here

People who have been reading Samizdata will know that I am presently in Seoul in South Korea. I am on my way home to Australia for Christmas. The reason that I am here is that when I was booking my ticket in January, it turned out that one of the cheapest options was to fly on Korean airlines, and that gave me the option of a stopover in Seoul. As I had never been to Seoul before, and as the idea of coming here had some appeal, I said sure, and booked a five day stopover.

The other advantage of stopping here was that it gave me a chance to fight my jetlag more or less in peace without friends and relatives expecting me to talk to them and/or do other activities at times of day when I was not fully functional. As the jetlag involved a nine hour time shift flying east (to here - ten hours to Brisbane), this was particularly good. That time shift is about the worst possible, as it means that after the journey your body things that you should be going to sleep at pretty much the exact time you have to get up.

There are two ways of dealing with this kind of time shift, and they can loosely be referred to as "forwards" and "backwards". Forwards involves staying up later each day until your personal time is the same as that of the place you are. Backwards involves going to bed earlier. Staying up later is usually physiologically easier, but with a nine hour east shift, it means you have to adjust a total of 24 minus 9 hours - that is a total of 15 hours. Backwards is harder, but you have to adjust nine hours only. Which is great, except that adjusting nine hours in this way is an extremely difficult thing to do.

However, if you only adjust five hours, then you can (say) get up at midday and go to bed at 4am. If you are on a business trip, or if you are visiting family, this is not really practical. On the other hand, if you are on a holiday this can be fine. If you want to sample the local nightlife, it can be actively good. And when you go home at the end of the trip, you only have five hours forwards to adjust, which is an absolute piece of cake.

This is what I did when I went to Shanghai earlier this year, but it is not what I have done on this trip, as on this trip I need to adjust completely in time for a family visit. This is a shame, as Seoul is a city that stays up really late. It is possible to go shopping at four o'clock in the morning. Shops that open at 11am and close at 5am are quite common.

This is no doubt great for a lot of people. However, if you have been leaving your hotel at 7am and then wandering around for the portion of the day where there are few things open, it is not always so good. Particularly when it is winter.

Time to return, I think

This blog has been semi-abandoned for the last year, and it was fairly abandoned before that. People who read Samizdata will know I show up there from time to time, but that is pretty much all the blogging I have done over the last year. The strange thing is that I have been getting the urge to blog in ways that are a little too esoteric for Samizdata, and I am not sure that everything I write belongs there. So, I probably do need my own blog again.

In truth, though, I need a redesign. I think I have conceded Patrick Crozier. And some of the pictures have vanished. (I still have all the originals and could bring them back if I were to make an effort, but I am not sure I am going to make that effort). I think the new blog is likely to be at least 50% a photoblog, too, partly because posting photos is less work, at least it is if you take a lot of photos (as I do).

For the moment, though, I might blog here.

Comments that got out of control

This was intended to be a comment left on this post at Jackie's blog, but it got out of control

If you consider the "World camera market" to be the total market for devices that are capable of taking pictures in some way, then the Motorola V3 RAZR is probably the best selling camera of all time. But that doesn't make Motorola an important player in the world camera market in actual fact, because the camera in the V3 is terrible and few people use that particular phone as a camera other than very occasionally. (It is fine as a phone, however). But if you choose carefully how do define the market, you can produce a market share of anything you want. The "market leader" in the camera industry is most definitely Canon, for the simple reason that amongst people who treat photography with a vague level of seriousnous or better, it is clearly the leading brand. It may be that within a few years time people start using their phones the majority of the time as their main cameras, but it is a good way off. And for the sort of photographers who carry an SLR, it will be "never", because lenses will never get small enough. (The question of "share" is also very important. Are you talking the percentage of the number of cameras in the world by volume, by value, by the number of photos taken, by the number of photos taken that are actually shown to somebody later, or what. All Dave Winer said is that Apple are the "market leader' in music players, which I don't think is necessarily even saying they produce the largest number by volume).

And I actually think that cameras and phones are much better suited to be in the same device than are music players and phones. (Why this is I will get to). Generally I just don't buy the idea that mobile phones are going to evolve into these multi-purpose devices that we use for listening to music, surfing the internet, reading our e-mail, et cetera. There are two reasons for this: one aesthetic and one practical. The aesthetic reason is that the more functions you put into the device the less simple it is to use, the more complicated the controls and the menu system, the more general a lot of its user interface becomes, and the less good the user interface is at any particular task. I think with portable devices we are headed for a world in which devices are going to be focused on doing one thing (or a small number of complementary things) really well, rather than doing a huge variety of things. The two portable devices I own that are the most pleasant to use are my iPod (which is just really good at being a music player) and my Blackberry (really good at doing mobile e-mail). I certainly do own multi-purpose smart phone type devices with everything but the kitchen sink in them, but these are more useful as backup for when something goes wrong with the dedicated devices than the devices that I would generally choose to use. In truth the mobile phone industry doesn't appear to have a clue as to how to get the user interface for a music player or an e-mail reader right (although Sony-Ericsson are doing best), which is why I have no intention of doing either of these things on a phone on a regular basis soon. But still I own phone that do these things.

The practical reason is battery life. The more functions you build into one device and which you use regularly, the more power it uses. Playing music is battery intensive, and if you use a phone for playing music a lot, then you phone is constantly running out of power. For many people this is a great social faux pas. Having separate devices means separate batteries, and individual batteries lasting longer. This is a big deal, and it isn't going to change soon.

And as for the iPod dying in 2006, we did get a lot of stories as to how it was in decline in the first half of the year, now that I think about it. Apple had a great Christmas in 2005 with the 5th generation full sized iPod and the 1st generation iPod nano, which were at the time very competitively priced given their capacities. In the first half of 2006 Apple was preoccupied with moving its computer line to Intel and didn't release any new iPod models and didn't drop the price on the existing models (despite the fact that the cost of flash memory in particular dropped precipitously, so that the iPod looked expensive compared to the competition) and large numbers of analysts and journalists assumed that sales have dried up. Apple didn't say anything until releasing financial results in July, at which point it revealed that sales were in fact extremely good (which is presumably why they hadn't cut the price). They have now released significantly cheaper and somewhat upgraded new models, and are going to clearly have another good Christmas. The iPod to me looks as a product to be in rude health, and is the product that is defining the market.

As for what is happening in Asia, there is actually an interesting story there. The iPod seems as dominant in Tokyo, Hong Kong and Singapore as it is here. (It is no coincidence that these are probably the three richest and most fashion conscious cities in Asia). It has a significant but not gigantic share in Taipei. It is not a player at all in Seoul, but Korea is in so many ways a world of its own. My recent experiences of China are indeed that the iPod has a fairly low market share. When I have wandered around the electronics arcades of Shenzhen and Shanghai in recent times I have seen large numbers of cabinets full of all kinds of MP3 players that are not iPods, in all kinds of shapes and bright colours. However, these are I still haven't seen many people using their phones to play music. People are still buying MP3 players as dedicated devices. Mobile phone manufacturers (especially Motorola) are designing mobile phone models specifically for the developing world, and the sweet spot seems to be cheap, elegant and stylish (which people do care about everywhere), and work well as a phone. Music players are nowhere in sight. When people in China want a music player, they buy a dedicated music player. (Photograph taken in an electronics shop in some rather remote corner of Shanghai where the locals really found it quite surprising to see a westerner like me).

However, even in Shenzhen, iPods are in pride of place at the front of the store, and they are what the teenagers are staring at longingly in the shop windows. It is clearly just about money. People buy non-iPod players because iPods cost too much. While most people have to ultimately make do with something cheaper, an iPod is clearly what they aspire to. I saw lots of people with iPod shuffles in Shanghai - a model almost completely lacking in useful features if you ask me - but people spend a lot of money on it in local terms because it is an iPod.

However, if there is a threat to the iPod's dominance, and there has to be one at some point, this is where it is. We have a lot of non-iPod MP3 players that are being produced for Asian markets. A lot of effort is going in to their design. It may be that in this highly competitive market someone gets the design of a player for the Chinese market exactly right in an unexpected way and this new product conquers the world. It may be that the parts for a full features MP3 player become so cheap that the (steadily declining for several years now) prices of genuine Apple iPods are forced down to the point where a relatively high overhead company such as Apple can't make money, at which point Apple possibly does lose much of the market. But that's a way off.

Basic point: I think it is much more likely that the electronics artisans of Shenzhen and Taiwan are going to ultimately defeat Apple in this market than are Nokia or Sony.

This will all end. Just not yet.

This description of the completely over the top Moscow nightclub scene reads so totally like descriptions of the Tokyo bubble circa 1988. That ended gradually after the stockmarket and real estate bubbles collapsed. However, Japan's political system was and is something resembling a democracy, and the Japanese economy was real, and modern, and actually made stuff, or at least some portions of the Japanese economy did, whereas Russia is becoming darkly repressive and the "economy" is just high energy prices and nothing else. An economic or political shock could be nasty, one fears.

Somehow, though, one expects Zaphod Beeblebrox to show up at any moment. The unending party on Stalin's boat sounds almost like something that Douglas Adams made up. Adams' work is even funnier now than it was in 1979. He had the ability to parody the future, somehow. Just the other day, an ATM did actually tell me that it was always glad to serve me. Really.

(Link via Arts & Letters Daily).

Is it just me?

Or is there something deeply endearing about the thought of Natalie Solent as a little girl, her kind and sympathetic Miss Marple like Englishness and razor sharp mind already there, (her destiny as a libertarian no doubt in place, but a way to go to get there), hiding behind the sofa from the Daleks, observing the precise details of the sofa carefully, and just generally figuring out the important questions of life (How the hell do they go up a set of steps?) faster than most of us.

I don't mind this answer

Your results:
You are Spider-Man

You are intelligent, witty, a bit geeky and have great power and responsibility. Spider-Man 95% Hulk 75% Iron Man 65% Superman 50% Green Lantern 45% Supergirl 43% Batman 40% Robin 35% The Flash 35% Catwoman 30% Wonder Woman 18%

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That was just awful

Italy eliminated Australia from the World Cup with a very dubious penalty with five seconds of stoppage time to go. Obviously, I don't care, and the sick feeling I feel in my stomach came for some other reason.

Place dropping, and I am making some attempt to be back

When I last posted to this blog three months ago, I was in China. Since returning to Britain on that trip, I have been to Ireland, Australia, Singapore, Malta, and Switzerland, and I have been quite busy back in London. I think things shall be a little quieter for the next few months, and I am hoping to get back into the swing of blogging a little. But we shall see.

Some problems are common

I am informed by a neutral third party that OxbloggerPatrick Belton is in Pakistan, and that he is able to post to that blog but not read it, as blogspot is blocked but blogger is not. As it happens, I am in exactly the same position, as I am presently in Shanghai in China, and blogspot is blocked by the great firewall of China. Blogger sems to be fine, however.

Yes, there is a problem with the pictures on this blog

I need to move them to a different host site. Hopefully I shall have time to do this in the next few days.

I didn’t go to evil medical school for seven years to be called Mr Evil!

My countryman Patrick Porter over at Oxblog takes slight issue with co-blogger David Adesnik referring to him as "Dr", because although he has done everything he has to do to get his Ph.D. (or actually as this is the other place, I suppose it would be a D.Phil), because he has been informed by his university that he cannot use the title "Dr" until he has been granted "permission to supplicate". I have not heard that phrase before, because although Oxford and Cambridge are very similar instituions, one way in which they are distinguished is by having different weird archaic language for weird, archaic customs that are in fact exactly the same. (I was once told that I could not use the title myself until "I had had the degree conferred upon me by a congregation of the Regent House").

However, it is a truth universally acknowledged by doctoral students (and doctoral graduates) everywhere that one may use the title the moment one has been informed that one has passed, whether or not this information is conveyed officially or unofficially. Another equally well understood convention is that if one has passed, examiners will inform you of this immediately upon completion of the oral exam, whether or not they are supposed to or indeed allowed to. (This leads to a certain amount of euphemism. My oral exam concluded with one of my examiners raising his eybrows at the other, the other examiner nodding, and then the first examiner informing me that "The Board of Graduate Studies forbids me from telling you the result of this examination now. However, you have nothing to worry about". In truth, although I had been nervous at the start of the examination, I wasn't terribly worried by this point, as I was aware that I was handling the questions I was being asked petfectly fine).

So typically, therefore, people start using the "Dr" title, when they have been informed that they may not use the title, and indeed when they have been informed that they may not be informed whether they will be allowed to use the title in future. But they do anyway.

In my case, although I could have had the degree conferred in absentia, I put off having it conferred for a further three years, as it took this long for me to arrange a time when both I and my family could come to England again to attend a graduation ceremony. (Sorry, I mean a Congregation of the Regent House). Although I was technically not supposed to use the title "Dr" for those three years, I did. And nobody cared. I had gone through what Patrick described as the King Hell Road Trip that is a Ph.D. and I had earned it, damn it. (However, the bureaucratic exercise to get from this point to the degree can still take a while, and people know this and therefore ignore it. Don't get me started on how the Board of Graduate studies lost my dissertation). A few months after my exam I received a letter from the university informing me that the degree had been approved (and reiterating that I was still not supposed to call myself Dr), and if anyone (an employer or a professional registration board, generally) wanted proof that I had the degree, this letter was perfectly adequate for them.

So congratulations Dr Porter. Enjoy the blogging.

Of course, it is also generally considered okay to be pompous about the "Dr" for six months or so after starting to use it. After that, we generally only use it professionally, when writing particularly rude letters to organisations that have given us particularly bad customer service, when filling out credit card applications, or when talking to Germans. (And then there is the question of whether one should put "Dr" before one's name or "Ph.D." after when using it professionally). Any use of it in excess of this is considered a bit of a wank. As indeed may be this post.

Update: Actually, thinking about it some more, there is one time when "Dr." is frequently used, and that is when greeting a colleague who you know from your Ph.D. program, particularly when you haven't seen them for a while. ("Dr Jones. Good to see you.". "Dr Jennings. How are you? I am absolutely splendid."). I suspect military types who went through boot camp together have similar rituals.

That Palace of Culture does get around

More from last weekend



The Saxon Market in Warsaw is build around a disused football stadium. The market isn't exactly inside the stadium, but it is built on the rim at the top of the stadium, the various stairs and slopes on the outer sides of the stadium, and the ground around the stadium. When I was there last weekend, the inside of the stadium was covered with snow. It is really a remarkable place.

I think it may actually be more a matter of "Polish parents want their kids to love English, actually.



That said, to fully function in the modern globalised world, I think you do need English, so you might as well start early.

I've been lazy about my redirections, but here is a roundup.

I have just posted a piece on Samizdata about the classic geek movie Tron, and why it didn't win an academy award for Best Visual Effects.

A couple of days ago, I posted a piece about searching for Danish cheese in a Carrefour in Warsaw.

The day before that, I posted a piece on Stalinist-Gothic-Vampire architecture in Warsaw.

I have a couple of other posts that I put up in the last couple of months for which I cannot presently find beacuse Samizdata's archives are screwed. I will post even more belated redirections when I do find them.

This is me trying to be too arty

I love the modern globalised world

I am sitting in my flat in London, eating some delicious kabanosy Polish sausage, that I bought a few hours ago in Poland. I think this is cool.

The English language could use this word



The sign just points to one of those little shops that selll computer components and accessories, and where the owner builds made to order computers for customers and does laptop repairs, often on a "no fix no fee" basis. (These shops often have one or two pay for use internet computers in the corner, too, so they can be useful if you can't find a more conventional internet cafe).

I am in Warsaw

I had a very trying trip here this morning, which involved (amongst other things) having my credit card eaten by a ticket machine at King's Cross Thameslink railway station, and sitting in an aeroplane on the ground at Luton airport for more than two hours before we were able to get underway. But I had a pleasant afternoon just the same. I was last here in 1992: at that point the city was a huge expanse of grey concrete blocks going in all directions to the horizon, surrounding a small but very beautiful centre that was rebuilt post war and one of the most ludicrous Stalinist buildings ever created. The ludicrous Stalinist building is still there, but it is now surrounded by a variety of other stuff. And the rest of the city has much more colour, and there are newer buildings. I am going to try to explore some of the outskirts of the city tomorrow. I suspect that some of the more interesting new developments have occurred there. (As always, that would be easier with a car, but I am doing this trip without one).

Obviously

You scored as Serenity (Firefly). You like to live your own way and donâ??t enjoy when anyone but a friend tries to tell you should do different. Now if only the Reavers would quit trying to skin you. Serenity (Firefly) 94% Nebuchadnezzar (The Matrix) 94% Moya (Farscape) 88% Bebop (Cowboy Bebop) 81% Babylon 5 (Babylon 5) 69% Galactica (Battlestar: Galactica) 63% Deep Space Nine (Star Trek) 56% Millennium Falcon (Star Wars) 56% SG-1 (Stargate) 44% Enterprise D (Star Trek) 31% Andromeda Ascendant (Andromeda) 31% FBI's X-Files Division (The X-Files) 6% Your Ultimate Sci-Fi Profile II: which sci-fi crew would you best fit in? (pics) created with QuizFarm.com

Redirection

I have a sort of tangentially on the winter Olympics but mainly on the Australian Institute of Sport piece over at Samizdata.

What am I?

Yesterday, I went into a travel agent to enquire about fares to Australia at Christmas. The rather bubbly and helpful girl behind the counter gave me some information and then asked me "Have you been to Australia before?"

Saturday evening song lyics

Sit, good dog, stay, bad dog, down, roll over
Well here's a good man and a pretty young girl
Trying to play together somehow,
I'm wasting my life, you're changing the world,
I get drunk and watch your head grow

It's the good times that we share
and the bad times that we'll have
It's the good times
and the bad times that we had

Well it's been a long slow collision,
I'm a pitbull, you're a dog,
Baby you're foul in clear conditions
But you're handsome in the fog

So I need some fine wine, and you, you need to be nicer
For the good times and the bad times
That we'll have

Sometimes we talk over dinner like old friends
Till I go and kill the bottle,
I go off over any old thing,
Break your heart
and raise a glass or ten

To the good times that we shared and the bad times that we'll have
To the good times
and the bad time that we've had

Well it's been a long slow collision,
I'm a pitbull, you're a dog,
Baby you're foul in clear conditions
But you're handsome in the fog

So I need some fine wine and you, you need to be nicer
For the good times
and the bad times we know will come
Yeah
I need some fine wine
and you, you need to be nicer
you need to be nicer
you need

For the good times
and the bad time that we had
Sit

Good times, bad times
Sweet wine, bad wine
Good cop, bad cop,
Lapdog, bad dog
Sit.

I need some fine wine and you, you need to be nicer, by the Cardigans, from the Album Super Extra Gravity

(More regular blogging is likely to resume here soon).

Back in London

Must sleep now.

I am in Valencia in Spain

However, I have found some WiFi pretty much in the last moment before I have to go home, so right now I need to get off the internet and head for the airport. More when I am back in London.

Yay

This morning I received a package from the Home Office, which included a letter telling me that my application for permanent residency status in the United Kingdom had been granted, and which also contained my passport. This is good news all round. One good thing is that I am no longer grounded in this country. I have been unable to travel for the last several months, and this has been getting me down. I was tempted to go to Paris for lunch tomorrow, but decided that this would be a little too expensive. (A return train ticket with this little notice would be about £100). However, I might go to Spain next weekend.

Happy New Year, Everybody

It is new year's eve, and time for my annual recap post. For people who have not been here in previous years, I am very deliberately going to answer the same questions I answered a last year, a two years ago, and a three years ago, even though some of them are perhaps not quite the same questions I would ask of myself now, and some are questions to which I don't really have answers. New questions will be added answered wherever they feel appropriate. I have had a year of ups and downs, I think I have to confess.

Countries I visited in 2005
United Kingdom, France (three times), Hong Kong, China, Australia, Germany, United States of America (twice), Italy, Denmark, Portugal, Belgium, Luxembourg. (* Methodological note on this question at the end)

Countries I visited in 2005 that I had not visited before
Luxembourg

Greatest product I discovered while travelling to one of these countries
What is there to discover in Luxembourg? Banking? Pretty scenery? Portuguese beer for twice what I paid for it in Portugal the weekend before? I did buy a nice bottle of Alsatian Pinot Noir in Luxembourg, and I do rather like the light Pinots for that region, but the occasion when I discovered this was in Alsace earlier in the year.

Greatest product I discovered in a country I had visited before
The obvious answer is Alsatian Pinot Noir, I guess. I could also mention my weird propensity for coming back from European destinations with large pieces of cheese in my luggage here, too. And I bought what was apparently an interesting bottle of muscet in the Douro port country, but I didn't get to taste it as the bottle broke in the boot of the car as I was driving much too fast to Porto airport in order to make my flight back to London.

Total number of countries visisted in my life
36 (Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong, China, USA, Canada, UK, France, Netherlands, Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria, Kenya, Tanzania, Portugal, Spain, Monaco, Italy, Japan, Ireland, Thailand, Nepal, Macau, Finland, Estonia, South Africa, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Belgium, Turkey, Sweden, Denmark, Luxembourg).

Number of these countries that no longer exist
3 (Czechoslovakia, Macau and Hong Kong, although you can argue both that Hong Kong and Macau are still countries or that they never were).

Best theatrical production I saw this year
The only play I saw this year was a production of The Tempest at the Globe, which turned out to be a mess. I did have a meal in a restaurant immediately after it, however.

Movies I most enjoyed in 2005
Pride and Prejudive. (In my mind easily the best adaptation made of the book). Serenity.

Most over the top (and very Japanese) movie I saw this year
I can't really think of a Japanese movie that I saw this year which qualified as "over the top", which is a shame given how over the top Japanese movies often are.

Japanese animated film that I am most glad that I finally caught on DVD
Laputa: Castle in the Sky . Also, I saw Howl's Moving Castle in the cinema, but it was unfortunately a dubbed print. I bought region 3 DVDs of Nausicaä of the Valley of the Winds, My Neighbour Totoro and Grave of the Firefies very cheaply in a Chinese DVD/VCD shop just off Canal Street in New York City, and I really must get around to watching them.

Books that I most enjoyed reading in 2005
I didn't read very many books this year, unforunately. I bought a few, but largely didn't get around to reading them. Radical Evolution by Joel Garreau was good in the sense that he interviewed all the right people, and was I think a sign that the presence of the singularity just down the road is something that is becoming clear to the mainstream, but it didn't contain much that people who have been watching this kind of thing were not aware of already. It wasn't as good as his Edge City which really was an exceptionally inciteful look into how the world is today (and which has influenced my thinking as much as any book I have ever read).

Musical acts that I would have liked to have seen, and that I could have seen in London in 2005 if I had bought tickets in time, but didn't
Sigur Ros (again). Imogen Heap. (She is playing London again in the New Year, however, and this time I have booked a ticket).

Favourite television programs of 2005
I have pretty much stopped watching television on television. I now get full season box sets of programs on DVD, or I use the wonders of Bit Torrent to watch shows that our friends in the TV networks will not provide in Britain until next year. As for as the DVDs are concerned, I finally watched Firefly, and it was almost too wonderful for words. There were clearly teasers and references to the next five seasons in the 14 episodes of season 1, and it makes me incredibly sad that I am not going to see those five seasons. I also watched Wonderfalls on DVD, which was great too. The one season we got of that seemed more complete though. Although I would have liked more of that too, I did not feel the loss as desperately as I did the loss of Firefly. (Still, there is obviously a connection between these two series. Tim Minear was one of the main figures in thr production of both. Minear is amazing: of all the fine writers of the team that Joss Whedon put together for Buffy and Angel, he is the one who is as good as Joss. I hope that one of his series gets picked up for more than one season before long. As for other TV I watched, I am still watching 24 which is fun if slight (and repetitive, to tell the truth). And I watched 24 which is good fun but complete tosh. Of the school of writers that started producing their own programs about a decade ago, JJ Abrams is the most successful. He is nowhere near as good as Joss (although he is perhaps a more visual director) but he is the one who has produced mainstream hits. Lost is fun for now, but at some point some of the mysteries as to what is going on on the island are going to have to be explained, but the explanations are going to be lame and everything is going to collapse.

Live sporting events I saw in 2005
England v Australia, first test, day five. Lord's. I managed to see just about the only day of the entire Ashes series that was not exciting. And at the end of it I was certain that Australia was going to win the Ashes. So was everybody else.

Most stunning place I visited in 2005
Crater Lake, Oregon. My drive up the Douro valley was pretty great, too. As indeed was my drive up the Tarn Gorge.

Place I visited where I felt most like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes, he spied the Pacific, and all his men looked at each other, wild with surmise, silent upon a peak in Darien
Actually, I was a bit weak on places of great importance to antiquity this year. These are often near seas and oceans, and most of the places I visited were inland. I went for a drive up the Hudson Valley, and imagined how this was once the greatest highway of the Americas, but I am not sure if this is antique enough.

Great bridges I walked over in 2005
The great bridges I visited this year were not walkable. (Note that I exclude bridges and tunnels I have visited in previous years from bridge and tunnel questions).

Great Bridges I travelled over in vehicles in 2005
The Millau Viaduct. The East Bridge. (If I were to include bridges I had visited before, I could have added a lot of others too. Visiting New York and San Francisco will do that).

Great Bridges I saw, but did not travel over in 2005
None immediately come to mind.

Great tunnels I travelled through in 2005
The Severn rail tunnel is about the best I can do.

Other places I visited in 2005 that are of interest to the hacker tourist
The computer markets of Shenzhen, China, and Chek Lap Kok airport, Hong Kong.

Places that are of interest to Jane Austen fans that I visited in 2005
The Cobb in Lyme Regis, Dorset. (And Louisa Musgrove was insane to jump off those stairs. I am amazed she lived). Jane Austen's grave in Winchester Cathedral.

Most upsetting event of the year.
The July 7 bombing of London. (Everyone was expecting it to happen at some point. It was still terrible.

Rawest emotional reaction of the year
Sadly, that is too personal for me to want to blog about it.

Moments in 2005 that most reminded me how Australian I still am
Wandering round the East End of London (where I now live) looking at little remnants of the East London culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and suddenly being aware where related little bits of Australian culture came from.

Most time consuming but rewarding activity I took up in 2005.
Cooking fancy meals for guests. (Actually this is a rediscovery of an activity from a few years ago in my life, but it is nice to have resurrected it).

Most surreal literary/travel experience in 2005.
I suppose the best I can do hear is "Reading Jane Austen's Persuasion in an Inn in Lyme Regis, while looking at the Cobb out the window and wondering if the Inn I was sitting in was the same as the one the characters were dining in in the novel. (One can seldom tell in Austen. She is non-specific about locations).

Most surreal musical/travel experience in 2005.
Listening to an MP3 of Suzanne Vega singing Tom's Diner in Tom's Diner in New York. (Note: it is very important that it was an MP3 that I was listening to). Listing to Sheila Nicholls "Fallen For You" while wandering around the Guggenheim in New York City.

Most unexpected thing that happened to me in 2005
I allowed myself to get depressed over a member of the fairer sex. I had promised myself that I never would again.

(*Methodological note: To have "visited" a country, I generally consider that I must have physically left the airport or the railway station. Merely changing planes or trains, or flying over a country or catching a train through it does not count. However, to say I "went to Germany" this year is perhaps pushing it, although I did strictly qualify. I flew to Karlsruhe-Baden Baden airport in Germany, but then got a bus directly to Strasbourg in France. (Actually come to think it I earlier in the day walked over a footbridge into Germany, had a beer, and then worked back. Actually I am talking crap. That means I qualify without any trouble.

Also, to count myself visiting a country twice, I require it to be on separate trips. If I cross the border from Spain to Portugal and then come back a couple of days later, I don't count it as two trips to Spain).

Update: When I posted this, I managed to neglect to recollect that I crossed the Tsing Ma Bridge in Hong Kong for the first time. That's a big one to neglect, given that it is the sixth largest bridge in the world. As a slight excuse, I did previously see it in the distance in 1997, and this time I did go over it in a train in foggy weather. (Or was it smoggy weather? The weather in Hong Kong is always smoggy).

Redirection

I have a piece on Time's people of the year and on the difficulties of browsing the web from a PDA over at Samizdata.

Michael Jennings quote of the day (and possibly post of the month).

More than once did Elizabeth in her ramble within the Park, unexpectedly meet Mr. Darcy. -- She felt all the perverseness of the mischance that should bring him where no one else was brought; and to prevent its ever happening again, took care to inform him at first that it was a favourite haunt of hers. -- How it could occur a second time, therefore, was very odd! -- Yet it did, and even a third.

Jane Austen. Pride and Prejudice. (Volume II, Ch X).

I don't have the latest anything

My desktop computer is based on a ASUS K8V-X motherboard with an Athlon 64 3000+ CPU. This is a socket 754 motherboard, and I built the computer about a year ago. Socket 754 is very passe these days, and if I were building myself a new computer, I would certainly base it on socket 939, and a faster CPU. (Perhaps a 3800 or similar).

My desktop replacement laptop is a Dell Inspiron 8600. This was a top of the line machine when I bought it two years ago, but it has now been superceded by the Inspiron 9300 (as the new top of the line machine, although that is a 17 inch laptop rather than a 15.4 inch laptop) and a new 15.4 inch model named the Inspiron 6000. (Actually the 8600 is nicer than the 6000, as older high end models usually have more optional features than newer mid market models with similar specs). In truth,
though, the Inspiron 8600 is still great. It is a Pentium M machine, which means it is much better than the Pentium 4 laptop I would have bought had I bought a machine six months earlier. And Dell shipped it with a 7200rpm hard drive, which improves the performance no end.

I subcompact laptop is a Sony Vaio T2XP. I bought this in June, and it has since been superceded by the Vaio TX2. This is based on a new motherboard build around the newer Sonoma chipset, has a slightly larger screen with an LCD backlight rather than a cold cathode backlight, it has an inbuild SD card slot (which is amazing for a Sony, and very welcome) and is slightly lighter. (In performance though it is pretty
much exactly the same, as Intel have not yet produced a faster ULV Pentium M than the 1.2GHz unit in my machine, and Toshiba have not produced a bigger 1.8 inch hard drive than the 60Gb unit in my machine. Both these things are expected early in the new year, and at that point Sony will produce a successor to my machine with higher performance.

My PDA is an O2 XDA IIi (aka the HTC "Blue Angel"), which I have had for about three months. Since I got it, the XDA Executive has been released (which is a 3G version with a higher resolution screen) and the XDA II mini has been released (which has similar features to the one I have plus quad band GSM, and is smaller). (Both of these also have little keyboards, whereas mine just operates with a stylus).

My present iPod is a 4th generation 30Gb iPod photo. Since I bought it in about March, it has been superceded by the new fifth generation iPod, which is thinner, has a bigger screen, and can play video. Apple have also since then introduced the iPod nano, which is much smaller and cuter, comes in black, and uses flash memory and is thus more shock resistant.

My present mobile phone is a black Motorola V3 RAZR. This is really cool, but since I bought it about three weeks ago, Apple have introduced the V3i, which has a memory card slot and a higher resolution camera, and runs iTunes.

My present TV is a 20 inch 4:3 Toshiba that I bought in 2002, and which is so out of date as to be ridiculous. At some point I shall buy a 37 inch or larger HDTV, but I want one with 1920x1080 resolution, and they almost all 1366x768 at the moment. As there are no HDTV programs available in the UK just yet, I don't really need to hurry.

I have a Pioneer DVD player that I bought in 200 for about five times what an equivalent model will cost now. The TV and DVD player have not been switched on for months, as I use my computers for watching TV and DVDs. In a year or two I shall buy an HDTV with a native resolution of 1920x1080, a Blu Ray player, and get an HDTV satellite box. Hopefully there will be HDTV PCI cards for my computers too, but it may be that the sort of copy protection placed on HDTV prevents this.

However, these products either don't exist yet, or presently (in the case of the TV) still cost about £5000, so I am leaving them for now. All my other gadgets are great and I love them, even if they are not the latest thing. In the case of TV, the latest thing isn't good enough for me.

I am very busy

Alas, my blogging is suffering as a consequence. There is nothing to write about travelwise, as I have applied to the Home Office for permanent residency of the United Kingdom, and I will not get my passport back until they have (hopefully) approved the application. I hope to get something up soon, none the less. I hope to do a little British travel between now and Christmas, also.

Redirection

I have a piece on a dinner talking space and a trip to the Hayden Planetarium in New York over at Samizdata and a piece discussing the Australia v West Indies test but mostly the Ashes over at ubersportingpundit.

I do love a good meteorite

My desk at home




Really, I don't have a problem.

I'm sad

Sitting in Tom's Restaurant on 112th St and Broadway listening to Suzanne Vega on your iPod is really lame, isn't it? Oh well, I suppose it would have been even lamer if I had bought one of those new video iPods and used it to watch an epsiode of Seinfeld.

(The restaurant is clearly a New York institution, but knows it is a tourist attraction none the less. There is a lot of Seinfeld memorabilia on the walls, and someone just asked the waiter to take their photo).

Another reason why New York rocks

Seemingly every time I turn my laptop on, it connects to the internet. This happens seemingly anywhere in Manhattan, and in a lot of Brooklyn also. Some of these are no doubt from people who have left their routers open in apartments above me, but a lot of these are simply businesses - bars and cafes and others - who provide free WiFi for their customers. It's great. (For one thing I didn't bring a guidebook, but my laptop can easily perform that function for me if it is connected to the internet). London is not like this. Density is lower, and the culture of free hotspots hasn't really taken off.

I am in the Apple store in SoHo.

Internally, it is pretty much exactly the same as the Apple store in London. Externally, the SoHo store is more interesting, as the store is an interestingly redeveloped old post office. This is typical though - Apple does great design with its retail stores just as it does with its products.

(No Michael, you can't have a new iPod).

Very Belated Redirection. (Hi Natalie).

A number of days ago I posted a piece discussing my first visit to New York in 1991 and the start of this trip over at Samizdata.

Around Canal Street

The shops selling seafood in the Vietnamese annex of Chinatown really do have some amazing stuff. It's much more diverse than what I can get in London, and so much cheaper.



I would really enjoy cooking meals based around some of this. Actually the really big prawns would be great. Make a fresh curry, and garnish perhaps with a bit of coriander. And serve with a Sancerre, perhaps. Yum.

I am in Poughkeepsie, New York.

Not much to say about it, but I love the name. (Actually, plenty to say about it. This stretch of the Hudson was where the very rich people of the Gilded Age built their mansions, and Franklin Roosevelt's presidential library and home are nearby). Very pretty suspension bridge across the river here, too. Actually there are a whole lot of very pretty suspension bridges across the hudson starting in New York City.

And I have exceeded my previous high for "ludicrous rental car upgrades". This time I ordered an "economy" car and was given a full size sports utility vehicle. Driving it in Manhattan on a weekday was, well, fun.

Nerdity

I have my Sony Vaio T2XP laptop with me on this trip. It is the smallest full function laptop I know, which is why I bought it. It weighs practically nothing and is the perfect travel laptop. (Disadvantages: the keyboard is a little cramped, the 1.8 inch 4200rpm hard drive is a little slow and the computer thus takes a little while to start up, and the Matsushita DVD+/-RW drive is one of the few models I know that can't be made region free). But it allows me to remain connected when I am on the move. It is great in the US because there is just so much internet connectivity if you want it.

I bought the laptop just prior to my last trip to the US in July. On that occasion the screen broke on the flight over and I spent the trip mourning the laptop rather than using it. This time though everything has gone great.

Two reactions yesterday. Firstly, I send one of my friends an instant message saying that "I am drinking Bavarian beer in a bar in Brooklyn just near the Williamsburg Bridge", and I got a response along the lines of "Well switch off the computer and enjoy yourself then". Which was fair I suppose. The other reaction was in a Starbucks (also in Brooklyn). I was using Google Earth to find a hotel location and various other attractions in New York, and after a bit of zooming in and out, making various map featurs appear and disappear and the like, I realised that an NYPD officer was watching over my shoulder. "Is that a map of the whole city?" he asked. I sort of nodded, and demonstrated it a bit more, showing him how I could zoom in to individual streets and buildings. He was really impressed. I didn't tell him that it was in fact a map of the whole world. (OF course, few if any other parts have as much detail as do New York City).

Miracles

This morning I got up in my flat in Bethnal Green in London. I had lunch in the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station in New York City, and I am now having a beer in a bar in Times Square. I have just posted a description of this day to a global communications network from which people on any of the continents of the world (including Antarctica) can read this. My mind boggles at all this.

Gratuitous photograph of me in Luxembourg last weekend

Thank almighty God for that.

It has only taken a total of six and a half weeks after I moved in, but I have ADSL connected in my flat. Hurrah.

Slightly odd question

Do any of my London acquantances who are reading this want to buy a new PC? I have a spare Athlon 64 3000+ CPU and some spare RAM hanging around that I could use as a starting point for quite a nice computer. I am willing to build a machine and do someone a very good deal if anyone is interested.

Back in London

When it is not delayed, the Eurostar is a highly civilized way to travel from Paris or Brussels to London. Today it was not delayed, so I left Brussels at 8.30pm and was at home in my flat by 10.30pm. (There it an hour's time difference, so that is actually three hours).

Meanwhile, this is heartbreaking. A $10m weekend is nowhere near enough to justify a sequel, so 14 episodes and one movie is all the Firefly we are ever likely to see. Like a lot of people, despite the fact that I was a Buffy fanatic I came late to Firefly on DVD, but I found it to be wonderful. And just as David Edelstein says here, it was obvious from the little hints and things that were not explained that Joss Whedon had 100 episodes in his head. So really what I would like is that 100 television episodes. A few movies would have been a nice alternative, but it now looks like that is not going to happen either. I am sure the movie will sell great on DVD, but even so that is not going to be enough to justify a sequel from Universal. So I am never going to learn Shepherd Book's backstory, or just why Inara left the Companion academy, or just what it is that is not a suicide kit that she gets out when the Reavers arrive in the pilot.

And as the rights to the Firefly universe belong partly to 20th Century Fox and partly to Universal, and the actors are all out of contract from a television point of view (although they are probably contracted to make more movies if more movies are made) the chances of Firefly ever coming back to television are close to zero.

This is sad. But I am still looking forward to the movie (which does not open in the UK until Friday).

I am in Luxembourg City

Luxembourg is pretty, prosperous, civilised, and look at all the cranes.



Technically in fact, Luxembourg is the richest country in the world. This is in a way misleading: it is possible to find plenty of regions the same size as Luxembourg that are more prosperous, they just aren't countries in their own right. (The really amazing thing is that the United States is nearly as rich as Luxembourg, meaning that the average income of 300 million people in the US is close to that of only the very richest regions of Europe). Still, though, this is a nice distinction to have. And Luxembourg is certainly very rich.

I have read in places that about 30% of the population of Luxembourg are actually Portuguese people here under their EU treaty rights. I haven't seen many (any?) people who are obviously Portuguese today, and I haven't noticed the language. There must be a Portuguese quarter of Luxembourg City somewhere, but I haven't found. it. (I shall Google in the morning). Luxembourg is quite unusual in the French and German seem to have pretty much equal status - try to thing of anywhere else where that is so, other than perhaps Switzerland. French seems to be the more commonly spoken language in the street and in shops and the like though.

However, time for bed. I got up too early this morning, as I had to catch the Eurostar. This is a very comfortable hotel, but alas the internet access is wired rather than wireless, and I cannot take the laptop to bed and remain connected.

Michael tries not to reveal himself

On Tuesday I went to the Globe Theatre to see The Tempest. The production was, alas, disappointing. At the end of the performance, I went with a couple of (female) friends to a pub nearby for a post theatre drink. Over this drink, we realised that we were all hungry, so we proceeded from the pub to a nearby restaurant. Once we had reached the restaurant and when we were about to order, I realised I did not have my mobile phone, but I remembered having it at the pub. I therefore excused myself, told the ladies what I would like them to order on my behalf, and went to the men's room, from which I called my mobile phone, discovered that it had been found in the pub and handed in at the bar, and arranged to come back and get it later.

There are two possibilities as to why I went to the men's room to do this. One is that I am slightly self-conscious about being the sort of person with a tendency to lose things, so I didn't want my companions to know that I had done it. (On the other hand they are my friends, and they know already what I am like). The other thing I was slightly embarrassed about has hopefully been detected by alert readers already. I was able to go into the men's room and call my mobile because I was carrying a second mobile phone, and I didn't want to reveal that I was the sort of person who feels the need to carry more than one mobile phone.

(The "second mobile phone" is actually a Windows Mobile PDA, but like many modern PDAs it also works as a mobile phone. I don't use it as my primary phone, however, although I do often carry it).

Belated Redirection

I have a picture of the front of a Portuguese McDonald's posted at Samizdata.

A nice weekend in which I tried to do too much

I spent the weekend in the Douro valley in Portugal, driving up from the city of Porto to the vineyard country where the grapes are grown for the finest ports. I didn't really have enoug time - and I really must go back and take the train up the valley some time. The railway follows the river even through some spectacular and quite brutal chasms where there are no roads. But still, it was nice. And it was pretty.

All Praise to Royal and Sun Alliance

Some regular readers will remember that I was quite upset when the screen of my amost new Sony Vaio T2XP laptop broke on the flight from London to San Francisco in July. Although the laptop was under warranty, Sony refused to repair it under warranty, stating that the screen had suffered "physical damage", and that was not covered under my warranty. (Thus I had to pay £310 for the repair). I stowed the laptop halfway throught the flight, and the screen was broken when I got it out a couple of hours later, so it is entirely possible that it suffered some mishap I didn't see when I got up to go to the toilet or when I was sleeping or something, but if it did I didn't see it happen.

As it happens I do have an annual travel insurance policy, which I bought principally because I wish to have proper medical cover wherever I go. And although it was not my principal reason for buying it, the policy does cover "physical damage" to "valuables". So, I thought I would make a claim and see what happened, with the general expectation that the insurer would point to some fine print in the policy and not pay. It was a perfectly legitimate claim, but travel insurance has a reputation for paying on the important things (ie medical) but not for the less important things (ie personal possessions).

But I was much too cynical. I received a cheque for £250 in the mail yesterday, which is the maximum amount the policy will pay for one damaged item. No complaint from me. The damaged laptop caused me a lot of anguish, but it has ultimately not cost me very much money.

I don't know, Natalie

Possibly people you have redirected?

Redirection

I have a piece on the switch from analogue to digital film-making (in the capture process) over at the Blowing Smoke blog.

Redirection

I have a piece that purports to be about the Sydney Swans making the AFL grand final over at ubersportingpundit.

Redirection

I posted two reflective pieces on day five of the fifth test, and on England regaining the Ashes over at ubersportingpundit.

Redirections

I have a piece on buying a really cheap microwave oven over at Samizdata, and a report on day four of the last test at ubersportingpundit.

Redirection

I have a report on day three of the fifth Ashes test over at ubersportingpundit. Australia is playing well, but the amount of play has been badly restricted by weather. Much as I am hoping otherwise, I think the game will be drawn and Australia will lose the Ashes.

Redirection

I have a report on day 2 of the fifth Ashes test over at ubersportingpundit.

Redirection

I have a report on day one of the fifth cricket test between Australia and England over at ubersportingpundit.

Redirection

Natalie solent posted in full an e-mail I sent her as part of a thread speculating why there was so much lawlessness after the catastrophe in New Orleans, and talking about what went wrong during and after the Kobe earthquake of 1995.

One thing I did not mention that is obviously a key factor is the simple lousiness and corruption of the New Orleans police force. The forces in New York in September 11 and in Kobe/Osaka in 1995 were clearly better police forces to start with. But yet this is not all of it. Part of it is, as I said, the nature of the disaster. Hurricane Katrina desolated a huge area. The police stations and other resource facilities from which essentially all the police in action in New Orleans were devastated themselves, and the chain of command was completely destroyed. In both New York and Kobe/Osaka, many of the police in action came from parts of the cities that were relatively intact and whose chains of command were operating reasonably well. That above all strikes me as a and perhaps the key difference. The area of the disaster in Louisiana and other states is enormous. For the other two disasters, it was geographically quite small.

(Mainly, though, the point I was making was that the Kobe earthquake was another recent example of a natural disaster in a developed country with which the local authorities coped badly).

And the newspaper article that started this discussion also referred to the Tsunami in Asia at the end of 2004. In that case I am not sure what is to be said. My guess is that there was lawlessness, looting, and all kinds of nasty things in places like Aceh, but it was hidden and not reported. Certainly news of something like this is the last thing the Indonesian government would want to publicise. But I don't really know.

Brief reflection

I went to New Orleans in 1999, where I caught up with a friend of mine who I had been to Cambridge with a few years ealier. (This friend is actually one of the loveliest women it has ever been my pleasure to meet, but alas she was and is spoken for). We went out to a nice restaurant, then finished the evening in a bar in a nice hotel, listening to jazz and drinking whisky.

This sticks in the memory, simply because it was a particularly nice evening.

My friend also insisted on taking me to a bakery, and buying me a bag of pralines, which I had in my hand luggage when I flew out of New Orleans on the way to London. I had to change planes at Dulles Airport near Washington, and on the Washington-London leg I was sitting next to an elderly woman from Michigan who was on her way to Scotland, where she was planning on spending several weeks travelling and staying in youth hostels. She was a nice old woman, but did insist on talking to me for pretty much the entire flight, even when I was trying to sleep.

However, at one point she did notice the pralines in my bag, smiled and said "Ah. I see you have just come from New Orleans". Which of course was true.

And now New Orleans is gone.

My ISP is taunting me

I have just moved into a flat in the East End of London. Postitives of this are that I am much closer to work and my commute is much easier, and also I have my own place, and I was tired of sharing and I needed a change. The number one negative of this is that I have a bona fide traitor as my MP.

However, having just moved I have a slight connectivity problem. Although there is a phone line going to my flat, BT for some reason believes that it is necessary to send an engineer out to my flat before they can connect my phone. And I cannot have my ADSL connected until the phone is connected. However, I informed the ISP in question (virgin.net) about the move, and they stated that they would connect the ADSL line as soon as BT allowed them to.

Yesterday, I turned on my router, and plugged it into the phone socket in preparation for the happy event a week or so down the line. To my astonishment, the LED on the router showing the ADSL connection started flashing (to indicate that it could see a connection and was attempting to log in) and then went to shining and not flashing (to indicate it had logged in). Turning on a PC, I discovered that I was connected to the internet. Checking with one of those websites that tells you about your ADSL, I found I was connected to my ISP (virgin.net) at 512kbps. Techically my connection is supposed to be 2Mbps, but still compared to nothing this was wonderful beyond words. I started celebrating, talking to people in Australia, all that kind of thing.

Alas, though, this morning it was gone. No more ADSL. They must have been testing the line or something. I am probably going to have to wait another week. I am now back in a cafe with Ethernet cables to plug into your laptop. Better than nothing, and I have no idea why they don't have wireless, but still not like having an internet connection at home.

But for a brief moment everything was wonderful.

I do appear to have actual readers

Gosh. Of course, what the BBC don't know is that I posted the piece they quote from from my laptop while sitting on a park bench in the middle of a pedestrianised street in Odense in Denmark, after a fairly lengthy search for a hotspot.

Redirection

I have a piece on the structure of African (and European) mobile phone markets over at Samizdata.

Update: A reader comment led me to add a (quite nerdy) lengthy footnote at the bottom of that post.

Do I need help

I am in Aarhus in Jutland in Denmark, on my way to see the longest bridge in Europe. When going through security at London Stansted airport this morning I realised that I was carrying a laptop, a PDA/Pocket PC, a Blackberry, an iPod, a mobile phone, and a digital camera. I think this might be excessive.

Dell sins, that may not necessarily yet have condemned them to the special place reserved for child molesters and people who talk in the theatre

Jackie has been referring to Jeff Jarvis' ongoing "Dell Hell" customer relations saga. There are no comments on her blog for me to leave a description of my own slightly odd Dell customer service experience, so I may as well blog about it myself. I haven't had "Dell Hell", but none the less I have just had a customer service experience which might suggest that their eyes aren't entirely on the ball.

I recently decided to send my Inspiron 8600 off to Dell to have them repair it. This laptop is nearly two years old, was well made (if a little heavy and not all that elegant) and has served me well. However, due to the best part of two years of intensive and at times a little rough use, it had suffered some damage. This was mainly physical damage to the case - its electronics were still working okay, although damage to the connector between the on switch and the motherboard also meant it was on the brink of becoming non-functional.

However, I didn't really want to throw the laptop away, because it was a high end machine when new and if it is in good order then it will still be useful for at least a couple of years, it has a beautiful (WUXGA - 1920x1200) screen, a new laptop of a similar spec would still cost about £800, and (although it is not my "travel" laptop anymore - I have a Sony T2XP for that, and although I do have a desktop as well) it is in many ways my "main" computer. My e-mail and my definitive music collection, as well as all my correspondence and financial information, are on its hard drive. (Yes, I do also have backups). As the damage was mainly to the case, I thought it likely it could be fixed for a lot less than the cost of buying a new one. Therefore, I thought I would look into getting Dell to repair it.

I sent them a description of the problem, and some photographs, and they quoted me a price for the repair. Fine, they sent a courier to pick it up last Thursday and I sent it off. A day later my credit card was charged the agreed amount.

Now, Dell have a strict written policy for out of warranty repairs. They look at the machine, they make a quote, if you agree to the quote they fix it and if you don't they return it without charging you anything. No trouble there. That's a good policy. However, on Friday, Dell left a voicemail message saying that additional parts needed replacing above those that I had already been quoted the cost of, and we needed to discuss this. Okay. Not entirely happy but I would talk to them on Monday. On Monday morning, I received the laptop back, returned to perfect as new condition. Several bits were replaced that I wouldn't have asked them to replace.

I then received a phone call from Dell telling me again that several bits needed replacing. We didn't get to discussing the price because I mentioned that I had already received the laptop back. The Dell guy on the phone from Chennai was puzzled by this, and said he would get back to me on Tuesday.

I haven't heard from him since. I assume that either (a) they have decided that since they have returned the laptop to me, there is no reasonable way they can now ask me for more money (particularly given that they are in breach of their own contract) or (b) the mistake was actually having this guy call me, and that in fact they decided that they would ultimately do the full repair for what they quoted me, and forgot to tell him that.

What is interesting here is that if it weren't for the two phone calls, I would actually be very happy with Dell's customer service. They did an excellent job repairing the laptop (what was a very beaten up laptop has been returned to as-new condition), did it extremely fast (I received the laptop back two business days after it was collected) and what they did charge me was quite reasonable. However, having received a quote, then having received phone calls telling me that they were taking that quote back and charging me more, and then not calling me when they said they would does ruin the experience somewhat. In a sense I don't mind never hearing from them again, as I have my laptop fixed and I am not at this point going to pay them any more money, so there is nothing to discuss. Still, however, I think there is merit in calling people when you say you will.

I also recently had a service issue with Sony, and the impression I get is that Sony's official service policies are less kind to the customer than are Dell's. They charge you more and for more things, and they are much more eager to find a loophole to their warranty in order to make you pay. And the people at Sony act in a reasonable well coordinated way to enforce these policies.

However, Dell seem to have logistical and organisational problems at this point. The left hand doesn't seem to know what the right hand is doing. It might be a "The company is now too large" proplem, I think. I didn't get the impression that there was anyone who has not trying to help me, and I also didn't get the impression that Dell's service policies were bad. They just don't seem to be implementing them that well at the moment.

Update: A different gentleman from Dell has just rung me up to tell me that there are additional parts that need to be replaced in addition to those for which I was initially quoted a price, blah blah blah. He seems to have no knowledge that somebody else rung me up for the same reason earlier this week, or that that person said he would get back to me and then failed to do so. This is not impressive. The temptation to turn my phone off in the hope that they will go away is strong, but I am not in truth going to do this.

Redirection

I have a piece on visiting the locations of Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo over at Samizdata.

Australia grows more complex, or perhaps doesn't

My native Australia did not start receiving large numbers of immigrants from East Asian countries until around 1980. It has received a great many since, so that there are now perhaps half a million people of East Asian background in Sydney. Of these people, the most predominant are Chinese people of various backgrounds and origins. However, due to this relatively late start, the majority of adult Chinese-Australians were born overseas. And at least when I was a student and a young adult in Australia in the late 1980s, I knew lots of Chinese people, but these people had been born in Hong Kong, Malaysia, or elsewhere. When I first visited California one thing that was striking was that there were ethnically Chinese people there who were so Americanised. They had been born in America, and so probably had their parents, and there were no hints in their mannerisms or accents or day to day attitudes that they were different in any way from other Californians. They were just Asian looking rather than European looking.

And now of course we do have a few Australians like this: people of Chinese ancestry who were either born in Australia or came as small children, and have gone through the Australian education system, and are now in their early twenties. Early twenties is of course the age at which Australians go abroad en masse. The tradition has long been for Australians to finish their university career, get a job in Australia for a couple of years to make some money, and then make a prolonged trip to the rest of the world for a year or so (possibly or probably doing some work along the way - stereotypically Australians do this and return with more money than they had when they went away) before getting married, having children, buying a house etc. (Those of us who leave and become permanent expats are a different category that has always existed, but I think we may have been getting bigger at the expense of the traditional year away people). This is quite distinct from the British "Gap Year" experience, where British people go away from a year between school and university. Australians tend to get older before leaving home.

These early twenties Australian trips away often start by going to London, and I therefore see early twenties Aussies all the time: on the tube, in pubs (on both sides of the bar), working as hairdressers, decorators, builders, and quite a few of those kinds of jobs that require skills but in which people are often employed for months rather than years.

And in the last couple of years the appearances of the Australians doing this have become notably more diverse. Yesterday, on the tube I was sitting opposite a particularly good example: an early twenties young woman, who was dressed in a casually Australian way, was speaking in a quintisentially Australian way, with very strong upwards inflections. (People don't always think about just what it is that distinguishes an accent, but the most notable thing about the Australian accent is the upwards inflection at the end of the sentences. Whereas in most other versions of English I know of people raise the pitch of their voice at the end of a question but not at the end of other sentences, Australians raise the pitch of statements as well. If you are attempting to immitate an Australian accent you have to get that right. Even if the resulting accent is imperfect in most other ways, it will still sound "Australian" if you get this right). And there was something about her mannerisms (a particular way of shrugging I supposed) that just screamed "Australian". And she was discussing the normal young Australian in London things: cheap places to live, good bars, possible sources of work.

But of course she was ethnically Chinese. Even the non-Anglo Australians follow the same pattern and get to the old colonial hunting-grounds. But seeing them in London is still something one notes mentally. In a couple more years it will be entirely unremarkable.

(And yes, I am very deliberately ignorning the descendents of the Chinese people who came to Australia for the gold rushes of the 1850s, before the immigration of non-Europeans was outlawed. These were a much smaller group, and while their descendents do still live in Australia, they are now so well integrated that they fit into a different categoty still).

Redirection

I have a brief overview of the solar system over at Samizdata.

Update: I also have some thoughts on today's very exciting cricket test (and some reminiscences about the MCG test of 1982-83) over at ubersportingpundit. It is now time for bed. Good night.

Some observations are just too easy to make.

I see the Koreans have produced the world's first cloned dog. Presumably they will clone quite a few until they find the tastiest, and then clone that one lots of times.

Very Belated Redirection

While the first test was going on between Australia and England last week, I made a couple of posts to übersportingpundit: a report on play on day 3, and a few brief comments on the press reaction to the Australian victory.

Crater Lake, Oregon



Of course, technically it is a caldera lake.