Europeans have a phobia about air conditioning. It was one of the more amusing things when I first discovered it, I was talking at the Goethe Institut in Berlin with a bunch of Spanish women at the time and the topic came up and I started to say how good air conditioning was (it was 30 degrees + in Berlin at the time) when they all started to say that it was bad and caused all kinds of health conditions. Now anyone that has been to Australia will attest that most Australians live in air conditioning, especially at the work place, so to have these Spaniards (and shortly thereafter almost every european within hearing joined in on the argument) say that it was very bad for you caused me to break out in laughter. Now the fact may be that air conditioning isn't GOOD for your health but to say that it is bad strikes me as being irrational, after all I have never heard of anyone getting sick from air conditioning, sure the very occasional case of legionaires disease, and the more common shock of entering a cool room after being outside in the blazing Australian sun, but never anyone having serious issues, and certainly I myself had never been sick from Air conditioning. Anyway that was my first discussion about heating in Europe.
Having just got back from Prague this all came back to my mind because I have spent the last few days in such excessively overheated environments that I am now wondering if Europeans don't have any ability to regulate their own body temperature at all or, that they are all living in the past when Europe was actually cold and they needed that level of heating, and now, although they quite clearly don't, no one has bothered to play with the automated heating in the last 20 years and they continue to just heat everything to baking temperature. For the entire time I was in Prague it didn't get below 13 or so degrees. This is not what I call a "cold" temperature, in fact during most days it sat at around 18 degrees, which is mild by anyones standards. Yet despite this fact every single place you walk into has the heating on full ball, at one shop where I could see the thermeter it was over 26 degrees! This problem is just compounded if it ever does actually get a little cold. At one point in my old workplace it was 8 degrees outside and 29 inside! Now try to tell me that such huge differences in temperature is good for you, or that you can even work in such hot tubs! This all ties into my theory that Europe just doesn't have the cold weather that it used to do (eg winters during WWII) but that the people still think its a transient thing.
Sunday, October 31, 2004
Prague
Well I have just got back from Prague, it was an interesting trip. The city is very beautiful, with a mismatch of architectural styles that only continental Europe can offer. It's particularly amusing that the city center has amazing French villas, gothic churches and baroque decorations, and just over the hill outside of the old city proper you have the wonderful architecture of the communist government. At times it felt like I was back in East Berlin.
What struck me the most about my trip to Prague though, was the cost. I had always heard, as a child, about countries that were really cheap to go and visit, normally they were asian countries (a fact mainly due to growing up in Australia and also due to the economy prevalent throughout the region at that point in time) but, by the time I started travelling such tales were merely that, tales. Prague was the first time that I have visited a country where I was probably earning ten or more times the standard salary. Now admittedly we had booked by lastminute and due to my girlfriends concerns had chosen a relative cheap place, but I was in for a shock. We arrived about 9pm on Wednesday night and got the bus marked on my printout to get to the "hotel". Well we got off at the right stop and then the instructions stated "walk across the road and you will see a street called 'zikova' and we are number 13". Well, we followed the instructions and sure enough we couldn't see any street called "zikova" and after a walk around the area I was beginning to get a little concerned. Eventually I hailed down a taxi and asked him ( he had the reassuring look of someone who had been drinking all day and had passed the state of drunkeness and now was in his own little world of happiness, suffice it to say I wasn't getting in the cab) and he gave me some directions and off we went. We eventually found the "hotel" which turned out to be some gigantic, communist hostel conversion, and immediately I was starting to get angry feeling somewhat ripped off. We entered and the old lady manning the reception didn't speak a word of english, but after I said my name she perked up a little and handed me an envelope. Here's where it started to get strange :) Inside was a coupon and a hand written letter which read as follows:
Dear My Smee,
you have reservation for 1 twin room with private bathroom from 27/10/2004 for 3 nights. The room is at Hotel Masarykova. Tha'kurova 1, Prague 6. Please, give them the voucher and the will give you the key at reception. Please, could you stop here (Zikova 13) tomorrow from 10am to 1pm to pay for accommodation. Thank you.
Accompanying this was a little diagram with a big highlighted blob, presumably showing us where our new hotel was situated. My confidence at this point was reaching an all time high and thus we set out for our new place. In the end it all worked out ok, the new hotel was actually the Universities techical college and converted into quite an acceptable hotel. What truly started to amaze me though was the cost of things. One night, being very tired and out of other easy options, we decided to have dinner at the hotel restaurant. We each had a 3 course meal with multiple cocktails and coffees etc, when the bill came it was 400 kroner, which equates to about 8 pounds. All of a sudden I realised I was in the fabled country I had heard about as a kid!
I spent the majority of the next few days ducking into every store in between seeing all the tourist attractions. It was quite an experience to go out and fine dine, buy whatever you want at the shops and just not worry about money at all. Certainly it was the first experience of its kind for me.
What struck me the most about my trip to Prague though, was the cost. I had always heard, as a child, about countries that were really cheap to go and visit, normally they were asian countries (a fact mainly due to growing up in Australia and also due to the economy prevalent throughout the region at that point in time) but, by the time I started travelling such tales were merely that, tales. Prague was the first time that I have visited a country where I was probably earning ten or more times the standard salary. Now admittedly we had booked by lastminute and due to my girlfriends concerns had chosen a relative cheap place, but I was in for a shock. We arrived about 9pm on Wednesday night and got the bus marked on my printout to get to the "hotel". Well we got off at the right stop and then the instructions stated "walk across the road and you will see a street called 'zikova' and we are number 13". Well, we followed the instructions and sure enough we couldn't see any street called "zikova" and after a walk around the area I was beginning to get a little concerned. Eventually I hailed down a taxi and asked him ( he had the reassuring look of someone who had been drinking all day and had passed the state of drunkeness and now was in his own little world of happiness, suffice it to say I wasn't getting in the cab) and he gave me some directions and off we went. We eventually found the "hotel" which turned out to be some gigantic, communist hostel conversion, and immediately I was starting to get angry feeling somewhat ripped off. We entered and the old lady manning the reception didn't speak a word of english, but after I said my name she perked up a little and handed me an envelope. Here's where it started to get strange :) Inside was a coupon and a hand written letter which read as follows:
Dear My Smee,
you have reservation for 1 twin room with private bathroom from 27/10/2004 for 3 nights. The room is at Hotel Masarykova. Tha'kurova 1, Prague 6. Please, give them the voucher and the will give you the key at reception. Please, could you stop here (Zikova 13) tomorrow from 10am to 1pm to pay for accommodation. Thank you.
Accompanying this was a little diagram with a big highlighted blob, presumably showing us where our new hotel was situated. My confidence at this point was reaching an all time high and thus we set out for our new place. In the end it all worked out ok, the new hotel was actually the Universities techical college and converted into quite an acceptable hotel. What truly started to amaze me though was the cost of things. One night, being very tired and out of other easy options, we decided to have dinner at the hotel restaurant. We each had a 3 course meal with multiple cocktails and coffees etc, when the bill came it was 400 kroner, which equates to about 8 pounds. All of a sudden I realised I was in the fabled country I had heard about as a kid!
I spent the majority of the next few days ducking into every store in between seeing all the tourist attractions. It was quite an experience to go out and fine dine, buy whatever you want at the shops and just not worry about money at all. Certainly it was the first experience of its kind for me.
Wednesday, October 27, 2004
Holiday
Well I am off in a few hours on a trip to Prague. Not sure what it will be like, but with luck given the time of year it should be quite cold and romantic (I am going with my girlfriend). My only concern at this point is whether or not I will get knocked back at the border! In the past all Australians and New Zealanders needed to have a visa to go into Czechoslovakia but apparently with its recent inclusion into the EU that has now been waived.... or at least that is what my online data mining revealed. I will find out soon enough.
Tuesday, October 26, 2004
The Apostrophe's Apostrophe
For some reason people have for quite some time enjoyed picking on my use of the Apostrophe. I have never quite understood why, out of all my writing shortcomings, this particular point seems to upset more people then any other, friends like Benjamin Waters, Adam Nealis and even my father. So I thought I would go and read up on precisely how you are meant to use an Apostrophe, and came up with this link. That read it has merely confirmed how I thought an apostrophe should be used, so I am none the wiser. Still going back over some other writing of mine I have noticed that I have a habit of using the apostrophe with acronyms. The problem seems to be that as an unix user I am exceptionally sensitive to capitals, and as such I tend to avoid using them at all, even when it is appropriate. This means that my abbreviations almost always are written in lower case, which then looks very strange with a "s" tacked on the end to pluralise it, hence my use of the apostrophe in such circumstances. Anyway I shall finish this blog with a request that if you ever see inappropriate use of an apostrophe in my writings let me know! That's what the comment section is for ;)
Saturday, October 23, 2004
Spam
Spam normally means unsolicited email, but what has me shaking my head today is "comment spam". Get this, someone had enough spare time to write a few bots to examine rss feeds and then follow them back to their webpage origin and start posting random comments on blogs. Now the bots are not dumb, they use open proxies and constantly change their ips, the actual content of the comments is normally fairly meaningless and sometimes random, BUT the url that they use is the actual spam. In my case I already have a poker spam bot spamming my blog thats been up all of a few days. Naturally I have now put some mechanisms in place to stop it but it never ceases to amaze me that people think by putting a comment in an ordinary person's blog that they will somehow generate clicks. sigh
Opening Hours
Someone explain to me how it is that the majority of service industries can only manage to open 10-4 each day and still survive? Why is it that the majority of the work force manages to work at LEAST 9-5 and yet banks, post offices, any government department can only manage to staff themselves for a few hours a day. What's more someone explain to me how shops manage to make a profit when most of their clientele are still at work! I really don't get it, I feel like shouting to all the shops that are closed when I finish work at 6:30 to stay open for another hour or two and I would actually be able to buy something from them! I can't be the only one in this predicament.
Friday, October 22, 2004
zaurus
I have been wondering what to do about mobile technology for a while, by that I mean do you buy a telephone that is also a pda and mp3 player? or do you buy a pda that is also a mp3 player and a phone ? I always like to have best of breed products so the key question was do i sacrifice quality by combining all three into one function? For a long time now I have been very tempted to buy a zaurus, but I have put it off rationalising that I should wait for the next model because while the current model at the time didn't have inbuilt bluetooth, wireless and was running a slow cpu. Much to my relief a new zaurus has come out and, lo and behold, it has almost precisely the same specs as the old one except that now it has a pitiful 4gb hd in it! This has really put an end to my considerations about buying a pda for some time, as I am really only interested in PDAs that run linux as that best integrates with my existing infrastructure. I am still in shock though that sharp would bring out a new model, with all its associated costs, with a tiny increase in cpu speed, a pathetic hd, and still no inbuilt wifi or bluetooth. Their official reasoning is that they are focussing on the Japanese market, but this seems rather shortsighted to me, and besides talking to my friends in Japan they say that wifi is important over there anyway!
Now I have to wait for another decent linux based pda (or pda I can make linux run on well, not have to shoe horn it in like a ipaq).
Now I have to wait for another decent linux based pda (or pda I can make linux run on well, not have to shoe horn it in like a ipaq).
Wednesday, October 20, 2004
Email is another topic of interest / rants for me. Few things have had such a great impact on the modern way of life as email and yet we still can't even agree on the term to use! Being a unix user, I was educated early on in how to use email correctly which involved a whole ettiquette (or should that be nettiquette?). This involved not topposting and quoting correctly. It seems that increasingly few people that use email have any idea on how to post so that their message is conveyed as legibly as possible, resulting in a mismatch of horrid text, formatted in all kinds of ways and entire messages quoted, when really all that was relevant was a line or two.
Reading through my inbox this morning I wonder if in my role as security admin I can enforce a policy on how to email :)
Reading through my inbox this morning I wonder if in my role as security admin I can enforce a policy on how to email :)
Dark Days
I really like Europe, so much so that since I have left Australia I don't really miss a thing about it, well except for the food. Most people I come across invariably ask me at some point in the conversation "so, when are you planning on going back home?". Ofcourse this presuposes that I have a place I consider "home", and after adding up how many times I have moved in my life (34 at last count) it isn't suprising to note that I don't really have a place I consider home. Still, I get some weird looks when I explain that I have no intentions of going back to Australia, everyone in London thinks that Australia is the best place in the world to live, maybe it is, but not for me. Instead I prefer the cold, dark days of Northern Europe and believe me that is precisely what the weather is like right now.
Its hard to get used to, in Sydney it gets darker in Winter then Summer (obviously) but nothing like Northern Europe. Even here in London by the middle of Winter the sun doesn't come up until 9am ish and then its dark again by 4pm, not just the sun has gone down, but DARK. I love it :)
Its hard to get used to, in Sydney it gets darker in Winter then Summer (obviously) but nothing like Northern Europe. Even here in London by the middle of Winter the sun doesn't come up until 9am ish and then its dark again by 4pm, not just the sun has gone down, but DARK. I love it :)
Tuesday, October 19, 2004
Browsing
I have never liked the term "surfing", as an Australian it doesn't exactly have many connotations with the electronic world, besides which it reeks of lameness. Instead I browse, although I have to admit I am not really what you would call a power browser, still I do spend some time each day looking up various things. I am inspired to write this because of two pet hates, browsers and badly designed webpages.
As a long time user of Linux I have been frustrated over the years by the lack of support for non IE browsers and while it is getting better (MS have done such a bad job with IE that people are actually leaving it in droves) there is still nothing more frustrating then going to a webpage and being told that "your browser is not able to view this site, please upgrade to IE 5+ and try again". Firstly I have no idea what they think IE 5+ can do that firefox can't but chances are they just do the check and reject you based on your user agent (the string that your browser sends to the server to identify itself and its capabilities). In reality you can probably view the site just fine, but because of some silly web designer who thought it was "kewl" to include a check and ban you, you can't view a thing. The other more frustrating thing is when you hit a web page and it is so heavily customised for IE that it really doesn't render at all in anything else. I know I am not alone in this, in fact over the years I have seen many amusing posts about this kind of thing, but it still never fails to frustrate you when you are on the receiving end. Personally I browse for information, and I want that information presented to me in an accessible, available manner, I don't want to have to dig through reems of shit, install 4 plugins and then spend 5 minutes digging through the site to find that information.
Browsers are another surprising thing for me. People continue to use IE. Think about that. This is a product that is so bad that even MS are completely rewriting it and have stopped releasing it as a stand alone product (although that was also due to their antitrust case) It has more security holes then any other browser in existance and probably more then most OSs. Now compare that with a product like Firefox. Firefox is a complete rewrite of Mozilla and has huge improvements over its predecessor. Aside from how good the rendering function is its the features that really set firefox apart, and even though many other browsers are now catching up to them (things like tabbed browsing etc are all firefox innovations AFAIK) there is one thing that still really sets firefox apart, plugins. Plugins allow you to turn your mild mannered browser into a superman of browsing kind. There are so many plugins out there that you can do almost anything you can imagine with them, from turning firefox into a rss reader, to doing dictionary checks with a click, to mouse gestures, to traffic shaping downloads there is a lot there. Click on the firefox link in my "Things I use" section and go see what I mean.
As a long time user of Linux I have been frustrated over the years by the lack of support for non IE browsers and while it is getting better (MS have done such a bad job with IE that people are actually leaving it in droves) there is still nothing more frustrating then going to a webpage and being told that "your browser is not able to view this site, please upgrade to IE 5+ and try again". Firstly I have no idea what they think IE 5+ can do that firefox can't but chances are they just do the check and reject you based on your user agent (the string that your browser sends to the server to identify itself and its capabilities). In reality you can probably view the site just fine, but because of some silly web designer who thought it was "kewl" to include a check and ban you, you can't view a thing. The other more frustrating thing is when you hit a web page and it is so heavily customised for IE that it really doesn't render at all in anything else. I know I am not alone in this, in fact over the years I have seen many amusing posts about this kind of thing, but it still never fails to frustrate you when you are on the receiving end. Personally I browse for information, and I want that information presented to me in an accessible, available manner, I don't want to have to dig through reems of shit, install 4 plugins and then spend 5 minutes digging through the site to find that information.
Browsers are another surprising thing for me. People continue to use IE. Think about that. This is a product that is so bad that even MS are completely rewriting it and have stopped releasing it as a stand alone product (although that was also due to their antitrust case) It has more security holes then any other browser in existance and probably more then most OSs. Now compare that with a product like Firefox. Firefox is a complete rewrite of Mozilla and has huge improvements over its predecessor. Aside from how good the rendering function is its the features that really set firefox apart, and even though many other browsers are now catching up to them (things like tabbed browsing etc are all firefox innovations AFAIK) there is one thing that still really sets firefox apart, plugins. Plugins allow you to turn your mild mannered browser into a superman of browsing kind. There are so many plugins out there that you can do almost anything you can imagine with them, from turning firefox into a rss reader, to doing dictionary checks with a click, to mouse gestures, to traffic shaping downloads there is a lot there. Click on the firefox link in my "Things I use" section and go see what I mean.
RSS
Being quite an active netizen I have seen the RSS logos around on a lot of the sites that I visit, but I had never really stopped to investigate precisely what it meant. Today, prompted by Sham at work, I did some investigation and am happy to say I have stumbled on the world of RSS. Basically RSS is just a standardized feed of any given webpage, or infact any data really. It is best used with a RSS reader that basically allows you to periodically poll a site for an update and if so it will show you a summary (or in fact the full text its definable) and provide you a link to the full story. I did some research and the best one I have found yet for unix is Liferea which seems to have all the features that you could want and a decent interface. My only issue with it is that as a KDE user I had to install half of gnome to get it working, but it was worth it.
What makes RSS really powerful is just how many sites are now starting to use it. Chances are that your favourite web sites that change information on a regular basis have some kind of RSS feed, including big sites like cnn / bbc / smh etc.
A good introductory link that I have found which covers things like blogs and RSS. A more interesting blurb can be found at jwz's.
It is worth noting that Wordpress , the package I use to power this blog supports RSS feeds out of the box, so in fact you can subscribe to this blog and automatically see the updates as I type them!
What makes RSS really powerful is just how many sites are now starting to use it. Chances are that your favourite web sites that change information on a regular basis have some kind of RSS feed, including big sites like cnn / bbc / smh etc.
A good introductory link that I have found which covers things like blogs and RSS. A more interesting blurb can be found at jwz's.
It is worth noting that Wordpress , the package I use to power this blog supports RSS feeds out of the box, so in fact you can subscribe to this blog and automatically see the updates as I type them!
Monday, October 18, 2004
hello world
You would think that not only as a geek but as an owner of a web design company I would have had a webpage years ago, but, never having an interest in HTML, I have put it off until I stumbled across blogs, which ofcourse this is one. Basically this enables me to simply post my thoughts / opinions with the minimal hassle and continue to know nothing about HTML :) Currently I am playing around with the presentation and trying to setup a few things that are not strictly speaking a blog, but we will see how it goes. I have too many other things that I want to do and I am only doing this because it is simple so I doubt I will get done what I want done with this page but we will see.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)