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.