Well I'm here in "the big apple" and once again enjoying my trip having arrived in time for a christmas lunch courtesy of my friend John Burridge. It's funny how similar and yet how different american society and culture is compared to Australia's. As an example just after the plane touched down at Newark, all the americans on board immediately burst out into rapturous applause. Aparently it's an american custom to applaud the captain of the plane upon a successful touchdown. Well as you can imagine there was a look of startled confusion on the face of almost every non american on board the plane. The second thing that struck me about america, and maybe this is just particular to the NY region I don't know, is how hopeless the cab drivers are at finding their way around. In this day and age I expect all cab drivers to have GPS satellites, but apparently that's a little too advanced for most, still though I don't think it's unreasonable to expect that a cab driver would know where he is going, or at the very least to have a map to refer to if they had absolutely no idea. Of course none of those things would be the case in NY. So far I've caught about 14 or so cabs including my last trip and this one, and not ONCE has the cab driver even had a vague idea where Brooklyn was, let alone the street name I give them. They think it's odd that I can't direct them!
Another thing that you notice is just how sweet everything is over here. I remember when I first visited, ironically enough, John in London (at the time I was living in Berlin) and what struck me was just how salty everything was in England. Truth be told I still notice it everytime I come back from a stay of a week or more anywhere else. In america it's not the salt that you notice but the sweetness. I ordered a coffee this morning and asked got asked if I'd like sugar in it, to which I replied affirmatively and was shortly thereafter given said coffee. The coffee was undrinkable, not because it was too hot, or burnt coffee, but because it felt like I was drinking some sugar with just enough hot water to melt it. All of that said though I really do like it here, everyone, for good or bad, is open and inquisitive and very likely to strike up a conversation with you even as a complete stranger. It'd be the perfect trip if only I could find a way to get the live cricket without having to hang out in an Aussie bar ;)
Thursday, December 28, 2006
Monday, December 25, 2006
'twas the night before christmas ...
and all through the net, not a thing stirred, not even a mouse.
Well i'm sitting here counting down the hours till I hop on a plane and head off to New York. The heavy fog that caused chaos at Heathrow had me worried for a while, but as it cleared up over 48 hours ago, I'm hoping that they have got through the backlog, or at least got things back on schedule for my flight out at 0900. So as I have packed my bags and done all the things that need to be done I thought I'd have a look around the net while I had some spare time and write up a blog.
It's rare that I get excited about something in GUI land (graphical user interfaces) and it's even rarer when i havn't heard of it before stumbling onto it, but that was the case with Beryl. I had read some vague articles a year or two back about "composite window managers" and thought to myself that it would be good to have something decent for linux, but had then consigned it to the back of my mind. Of course in recent times (though the hype seems to have died down a bit of late) Max OSX has made lots of headlines about nice, friendly usable unix AND, most importantly, it's gorgeous GUI. Us linux users on the other hand have been stumbling along with KDE and Gnome for years thinking that while it's not that pretty, it's very functional and stable (my desktop at work, arguably one of the most abused machines in the world, has been up and stable without crashes [well at least not self induced ones] for about 8 months). We'd long since given up on actually playing games, well all the sensible ones had, there are of course a bunch of die hard Linux users that like to spend five times longer trying to get the game to run under cedega then they do actually playing the game, but hey it takes all types right? Personally the ONLY reason I have a windows partition at all on my desktop machine at home is to play games on and that's been the way since I left my amiga's. So you can imagine my surprise when crawling around the gentoo wiki I stumbled upon some screen shots of what looked like a REALLY sexy GUI. Further investigation wasn't to let me down and I was shortly examining Beryl in some detail and then installing it on my new home desktop. I'll side track here and say that I recently decided that I needed a new desktop at home, primarily because I bought a new Dell 24inch widescreen monitor and it's native resolution required a newer graphics card then what my old machine had. That in turn meant that I needed a new motherboard ... one thing led to another and the next thing I know I've spent a small fortune on what is comparatively, the best machine I've ever bought. By comparatively I mean that, I normally buy the 3rd or 4th best of each component on the market, that way you seem to hit an optimal point of performance and cost. At this point in my life though, I'm not constrained by the cost anymore and so I decided on getting something a little better ;) Needless to say I now have a machine capable of running a small supercomputing lab and my spare room (or my computer room as my ex liked to call it), now has a strong resemblence to a wind tunnel.
So here I am with a brand new machine running linux at a pace that I didn't think was possible AND a new, incredibly sexy yet functional GUI. Santa seems to have visited me early this year.
Well i'm sitting here counting down the hours till I hop on a plane and head off to New York. The heavy fog that caused chaos at Heathrow had me worried for a while, but as it cleared up over 48 hours ago, I'm hoping that they have got through the backlog, or at least got things back on schedule for my flight out at 0900. So as I have packed my bags and done all the things that need to be done I thought I'd have a look around the net while I had some spare time and write up a blog.
It's rare that I get excited about something in GUI land (graphical user interfaces) and it's even rarer when i havn't heard of it before stumbling onto it, but that was the case with Beryl. I had read some vague articles a year or two back about "composite window managers" and thought to myself that it would be good to have something decent for linux, but had then consigned it to the back of my mind. Of course in recent times (though the hype seems to have died down a bit of late) Max OSX has made lots of headlines about nice, friendly usable unix AND, most importantly, it's gorgeous GUI. Us linux users on the other hand have been stumbling along with KDE and Gnome for years thinking that while it's not that pretty, it's very functional and stable (my desktop at work, arguably one of the most abused machines in the world, has been up and stable without crashes [well at least not self induced ones] for about 8 months). We'd long since given up on actually playing games, well all the sensible ones had, there are of course a bunch of die hard Linux users that like to spend five times longer trying to get the game to run under cedega then they do actually playing the game, but hey it takes all types right? Personally the ONLY reason I have a windows partition at all on my desktop machine at home is to play games on and that's been the way since I left my amiga's. So you can imagine my surprise when crawling around the gentoo wiki I stumbled upon some screen shots of what looked like a REALLY sexy GUI. Further investigation wasn't to let me down and I was shortly examining Beryl in some detail and then installing it on my new home desktop. I'll side track here and say that I recently decided that I needed a new desktop at home, primarily because I bought a new Dell 24inch widescreen monitor and it's native resolution required a newer graphics card then what my old machine had. That in turn meant that I needed a new motherboard ... one thing led to another and the next thing I know I've spent a small fortune on what is comparatively, the best machine I've ever bought. By comparatively I mean that, I normally buy the 3rd or 4th best of each component on the market, that way you seem to hit an optimal point of performance and cost. At this point in my life though, I'm not constrained by the cost anymore and so I decided on getting something a little better ;) Needless to say I now have a machine capable of running a small supercomputing lab and my spare room (or my computer room as my ex liked to call it), now has a strong resemblence to a wind tunnel.
So here I am with a brand new machine running linux at a pace that I didn't think was possible AND a new, incredibly sexy yet functional GUI. Santa seems to have visited me early this year.
Saturday, November 25, 2006
Intuition and technology
Most people would say it's a bit of a contradiction, I mean how can you "intuit" something that is purely logical, yet I'd argue that is precisely what I do with technology. On my recent trip to iceland some of my friends commented on the amount of gadgets that I have (in reference to my laptop and archos) and another then commented "I don't know how he has the time to learn how they all work". I replied that I didn't "learn" how they worked, I just "intuited" it. I got a snort of derisive laughter and a knowing "ahh bens exaggerating again" look. I was surprised by Craigs look of amusement though, because the look suggested that he didn't think it was possible. It was then I started to think.
It started to occur to me that perhaps Craigs look wasn't joking and that he was serious, maybe people really DO have to sit down and think about how some piece of technology works. You see for me it's often unconcious and even when it's not its about 15 seconds of playing around, understanding some concepts that differ from the norm and then once again there is no concious effort to drive / use any technology. The reason for that, in my opinion, is that technology interfaces are all fairly similar and in many cases derived from similar bases. Take for example command line interfaces. Command line interfaces are considered clunky and unfriendly in todays computer world, primarily because people don't like to type and because theres a minimum amount of commands that need to be learnt in order to actually USE the computer. That said if you're familiar with say a unix command line interface, using something like DOS is quite easy as many commands are similar (whether thats through a concious effort of copying what was there before to keep your userbase from having to learn new commands, or because that was what works best is open to debate) and the more technology you play with the easier it becomes, soon your realise that things like Cisco's IOS are all similar on the command line to unix (though frustratingly lobotomized). Moving on to GUIs you find that windows is similar to xwindows which is similar to OSX which is similar to Amiga and so on, in fact the similarities between different GUIs are more noticeable then that of their command line brothers due to the fact that once a working GUI was found, the basic concepts were so universal that to deviate from them significantly was to actually hinder use rather then help it. I began to wonder if in fact we weren't the victim of our own successes in terms of technology interfaces, perhaps we'd be better off going right back to square one and redesigning something from scratch without the preconceptions of other interfaces. Still the fact is that in terms of using computers once you have a reasonable amount of familiarity with one using the others is easy. I can vouch for that because as a hardcore unix user I have still been able to do every task that I want or that others have asked of me on the latest version of Windows Vista that I've barely even used for more then 3 minutes.
Getting away from operating systems and computers though, back to where Craigs incredulous look originated, is the land of gadgets. Gadgets are a lot more diverse then operating systems and consequently the nature of the interfaces to them are likewise a lot more varied, or so you'd think. While it's true that superficially there are far bigger differences between interfaces on gadgets once again there are so many overlapping principals that I find it hard to understand how you can't just "intuit" their use once you've played with a couple. The first and probably the interface that most people are familiar with is the "old" digital watch.
The digital watch probably set the standard for most people's first interaction with technology devices, and in many ways it hasn't changed. The concept is still the same for most gadgets of a similar limited nature (by limited I mean simply that there isn't much user interaction required, monitors, watches, televisions and the like), the concept is one button will switch "modes", another or possibly 2 will allow you to actually change values and the last will be for miscellaneous usage. Those four buttons define almost all interactions for simple gadgets and that really hasn't changed in over 30 years now.
Outside of gadgets and fully blown operating systems we have the area that today would be termed the "mobile" market, or as I know it, PDAs. Basically this encompasses anything that has pseudo OS capabilities, but is limited in it's scope, generally limited to specific applications that have one or two functions, calendars or task lists and the like. I'd suggest that operating any PDA / mobile based gadget is actually even easier then operating a normal gadget as it is deliberately made to be OS like, and consequently anyone who is familiar with basic desktop functionality will find themselves at home using mobile devices, with the only difference being that your actual interface, normally some stylus or thumb board, is much more clumsy.
So after thinking about it for some time, and knowing that the majority of people my age or younger have spent at least some time playing with either an OS (most people work with one now), a digital watch or a PDA, you're damn right I'm surprised when you can't pick up a technology gadget and just use it.
It started to occur to me that perhaps Craigs look wasn't joking and that he was serious, maybe people really DO have to sit down and think about how some piece of technology works. You see for me it's often unconcious and even when it's not its about 15 seconds of playing around, understanding some concepts that differ from the norm and then once again there is no concious effort to drive / use any technology. The reason for that, in my opinion, is that technology interfaces are all fairly similar and in many cases derived from similar bases. Take for example command line interfaces. Command line interfaces are considered clunky and unfriendly in todays computer world, primarily because people don't like to type and because theres a minimum amount of commands that need to be learnt in order to actually USE the computer. That said if you're familiar with say a unix command line interface, using something like DOS is quite easy as many commands are similar (whether thats through a concious effort of copying what was there before to keep your userbase from having to learn new commands, or because that was what works best is open to debate) and the more technology you play with the easier it becomes, soon your realise that things like Cisco's IOS are all similar on the command line to unix (though frustratingly lobotomized). Moving on to GUIs you find that windows is similar to xwindows which is similar to OSX which is similar to Amiga and so on, in fact the similarities between different GUIs are more noticeable then that of their command line brothers due to the fact that once a working GUI was found, the basic concepts were so universal that to deviate from them significantly was to actually hinder use rather then help it. I began to wonder if in fact we weren't the victim of our own successes in terms of technology interfaces, perhaps we'd be better off going right back to square one and redesigning something from scratch without the preconceptions of other interfaces. Still the fact is that in terms of using computers once you have a reasonable amount of familiarity with one using the others is easy. I can vouch for that because as a hardcore unix user I have still been able to do every task that I want or that others have asked of me on the latest version of Windows Vista that I've barely even used for more then 3 minutes.
Getting away from operating systems and computers though, back to where Craigs incredulous look originated, is the land of gadgets. Gadgets are a lot more diverse then operating systems and consequently the nature of the interfaces to them are likewise a lot more varied, or so you'd think. While it's true that superficially there are far bigger differences between interfaces on gadgets once again there are so many overlapping principals that I find it hard to understand how you can't just "intuit" their use once you've played with a couple. The first and probably the interface that most people are familiar with is the "old" digital watch.
The digital watch probably set the standard for most people's first interaction with technology devices, and in many ways it hasn't changed. The concept is still the same for most gadgets of a similar limited nature (by limited I mean simply that there isn't much user interaction required, monitors, watches, televisions and the like), the concept is one button will switch "modes", another or possibly 2 will allow you to actually change values and the last will be for miscellaneous usage. Those four buttons define almost all interactions for simple gadgets and that really hasn't changed in over 30 years now.
Outside of gadgets and fully blown operating systems we have the area that today would be termed the "mobile" market, or as I know it, PDAs. Basically this encompasses anything that has pseudo OS capabilities, but is limited in it's scope, generally limited to specific applications that have one or two functions, calendars or task lists and the like. I'd suggest that operating any PDA / mobile based gadget is actually even easier then operating a normal gadget as it is deliberately made to be OS like, and consequently anyone who is familiar with basic desktop functionality will find themselves at home using mobile devices, with the only difference being that your actual interface, normally some stylus or thumb board, is much more clumsy.
So after thinking about it for some time, and knowing that the majority of people my age or younger have spent at least some time playing with either an OS (most people work with one now), a digital watch or a PDA, you're damn right I'm surprised when you can't pick up a technology gadget and just use it.
Wednesday, November 15, 2006
Iceland
Well I just got back from Iceland for an EVE gaming conference and let me say that Iceland is one really cool (forgive the pun) place to go! For a long time I've always wanted to go to Iceland, the idea of lava and glaciers in the same place is just too weird to pass up, combine that with the northern lights and scandanavian women and you've got my interest perked ;) So when I heard of the gaming conference set there I immediately signed up and along with 5 other friends headed off to see the last of the scandanavian countries that I hadn't seen.
The first thing that we all noticed as we were approaching the island was that it's actually a lot larger then you think when you look at atlas's, in fact it's not much smaller then the UK and certainly a lot more interesting to view from the air. Much like most "cold" places I've been it isn't actually that cold, I think the coldest it got while we were there was about -8 or so and maybe a few extra degree's for wind chill factor, but generally it was around 0-5. Now before you all go screaming at me that I'm a freak and that -10 is cold, think about it from the perspective of Russia which has many cities that AVERAGE well below -20 the entire year round, the gulf stream saves the entire European continent from a lot more then most people realise and this extends to Iceland which of course, sits between the European and American continents.
The first day we headed off on what was to be the first and last of our tourist trips. We did a trip around the eastern part of the island which started to give us all an appreciation of just how spectacular the nature really is in Iceland. We went and saw the geysirs which every 7-12 mins would burst up ~20m into the air in an explosion of water, sulfur and pure force that was quite spectacular. Equally fascinating were just the hot pools that were so hot that they'd basically sterilized the water and had a clarity to them that was amazing allowing you to peer down into what seemed like the depths of the earth. From there we headed out to Gulfoss waterfall which was the site, 10000 years or so ago, of a glaciar melting in a day due to geothermal activity and the resulting watershed carved out the single most impressive waterfall i've ever seen. At this point though it was about 1600 and the sun set and the temperature started to fall to what seemed like the depths of the waterfall in fact. We immediately started jumping around to try and stay warm which in turn resulted in a mammoth snowball fight on a treacherous icy path located just above a 100 meter fall into the abyss. Fortunately no one fell off, but few dodged my snowballs (of course throwing them is for girls, point blank is more my style!).
The next few days were mostly spent around the gaming conference, which conveniently, was located in our hotel. As usual Iceland is the epitomy of all things scandanavian, great women, high standard of living and amazingly expensive. Even coming from London, my normal fallback for when people complain about cost, didn't save me from wincing on the odd occasion when you pay 5 pounds for a standard beer. There was the usual drunk stories (actually some of them were more then "usual" given that 2 of my friends were scousers) one of which I'll relate as I thought it was quite amusing. Ritchie decided on the first night in Iceland that he'd have a big night and proceeded to get very drunk. By very drunk I basically mean insensate. By the time the night was winding down Ritchie was basically unable to walk and unfortunately for him he was staying in a hotel just down the road. At this point we got a storm warning and high winds as Ritchie and the guy he was sharing with leave for their hotel. Ritchie managed to fall over 27 times onto bushes, cars and basically anything next to the road. Then about halfway back to the hotel he just did a runner. We got a frantic call from the other guy saying that he couldn't find Ritchie and was worried he would die of exposure. A few people got back out of bed at 0500 and start to search, but after 30 minutes we couldn't find him so we all head back to bed. At 0600 Ritchie turns up back at our hotel saying "i'm cold, i just woke up on a building site". Scousers, got to love them.
In summary Iceland was a lot of fun, though a little too disconnected for me. Even though it's a first world country and in Scandanavia, it still lacks a lot of basic things that most big city dwellers take for granted, so while it's a great place to visit (and I'll be back even if just to see the aurora borealis which our trip was cancelled due to poor visibility both nights :( ) it's off my list of countries where I'd like to live.
The first thing that we all noticed as we were approaching the island was that it's actually a lot larger then you think when you look at atlas's, in fact it's not much smaller then the UK and certainly a lot more interesting to view from the air. Much like most "cold" places I've been it isn't actually that cold, I think the coldest it got while we were there was about -8 or so and maybe a few extra degree's for wind chill factor, but generally it was around 0-5. Now before you all go screaming at me that I'm a freak and that -10 is cold, think about it from the perspective of Russia which has many cities that AVERAGE well below -20 the entire year round, the gulf stream saves the entire European continent from a lot more then most people realise and this extends to Iceland which of course, sits between the European and American continents.
The first day we headed off on what was to be the first and last of our tourist trips. We did a trip around the eastern part of the island which started to give us all an appreciation of just how spectacular the nature really is in Iceland. We went and saw the geysirs which every 7-12 mins would burst up ~20m into the air in an explosion of water, sulfur and pure force that was quite spectacular. Equally fascinating were just the hot pools that were so hot that they'd basically sterilized the water and had a clarity to them that was amazing allowing you to peer down into what seemed like the depths of the earth. From there we headed out to Gulfoss waterfall which was the site, 10000 years or so ago, of a glaciar melting in a day due to geothermal activity and the resulting watershed carved out the single most impressive waterfall i've ever seen. At this point though it was about 1600 and the sun set and the temperature started to fall to what seemed like the depths of the waterfall in fact. We immediately started jumping around to try and stay warm which in turn resulted in a mammoth snowball fight on a treacherous icy path located just above a 100 meter fall into the abyss. Fortunately no one fell off, but few dodged my snowballs (of course throwing them is for girls, point blank is more my style!).
The next few days were mostly spent around the gaming conference, which conveniently, was located in our hotel. As usual Iceland is the epitomy of all things scandanavian, great women, high standard of living and amazingly expensive. Even coming from London, my normal fallback for when people complain about cost, didn't save me from wincing on the odd occasion when you pay 5 pounds for a standard beer. There was the usual drunk stories (actually some of them were more then "usual" given that 2 of my friends were scousers) one of which I'll relate as I thought it was quite amusing. Ritchie decided on the first night in Iceland that he'd have a big night and proceeded to get very drunk. By very drunk I basically mean insensate. By the time the night was winding down Ritchie was basically unable to walk and unfortunately for him he was staying in a hotel just down the road. At this point we got a storm warning and high winds as Ritchie and the guy he was sharing with leave for their hotel. Ritchie managed to fall over 27 times onto bushes, cars and basically anything next to the road. Then about halfway back to the hotel he just did a runner. We got a frantic call from the other guy saying that he couldn't find Ritchie and was worried he would die of exposure. A few people got back out of bed at 0500 and start to search, but after 30 minutes we couldn't find him so we all head back to bed. At 0600 Ritchie turns up back at our hotel saying "i'm cold, i just woke up on a building site". Scousers, got to love them.
In summary Iceland was a lot of fun, though a little too disconnected for me. Even though it's a first world country and in Scandanavia, it still lacks a lot of basic things that most big city dwellers take for granted, so while it's a great place to visit (and I'll be back even if just to see the aurora borealis which our trip was cancelled due to poor visibility both nights :( ) it's off my list of countries where I'd like to live.
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
The american life!
It seemed a suitable title given my previous blog so i'm runng with it :) I've just got back from New York and I'm happy to report that I've changed my opinion on that city! I headed over there to catch up with a friend, John Burridge, for his birthday. Perhaps a bit extravagant as I was only there for a weekend but, as a friend recently said "our parents might be the generation of jet travel, but we're the generation of cheap jet travel", never so true as now. My previous experience of NYC had been fairly bad, it was the last stop on my round the world trip 7 years ago and as such I was relatively depleted of tourist "energy", and spent most of my time shopping. Throw into the mix that I didn't know anyone there and that I had seen too many hollywood movies making me think that I'd get killed walking most places, it didn't exactly bowl me over with it's charms. This time though things were very different.
The first thing that I noticed this time around was just how friendly americans really are, they genuinely are interested in just interacting with random people that they meet. I think that London is probably the other extreme where pretty much everyone goes out of their way to avoid having to talk to a stranger. This leads on in part to service. One of my real rants about Europe is that no european that i've ever met in any situation seems to understand what the word actually means, I always get the impression that when you ask for something in most of the shops or restaurants that I frequent the staff think that they are doing you a favour by getting it for you. Americans on the other hand invented the definition of "service", everything is just so friendly and prompt. Sit down at a table in a restaurant and before you've even actually sat down someone is over with a glass of water, smilling, asking about your day and would you like a few minutes or do you know what you want to drink? It's just amazing how much of a difference that kind of service makes EVEN if it is fake, which I actually don't think it is a lot of the time.
Aside from service this time around I really saw a lot of different sides to NYC that I must admit made me think, again, what am I doing in London. It struck me on many occasions that the city seemed to be filled with people ... just like me. That is 30's, professional, travelled and a variety of interests. There weren't crazy crowds of children running around, or even worse, their teenage mothers. Of course NYC does have its downsides as well, most notably the fact that it looks like it's permanently stuck in the 1960's in that the amount of unadorned concrete is just phenomenal.While clean, the concrete all around just makes it feel dirty, which unfortunately does distract from its aethestic appeal. Still, there are amazing places like central park which not only huge, and unlike hyde park, INTERESTING it is also surrounded by some amazing architecture that you really can sit down and admire, while say, playing a game of chess ;)
NYC is cheap. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. New yorkers themselves sook about the cost of most things, most notably rent, but let me tell you coming from London, the place is seriously cheap. Most of the people I met complained about the rent at one point or the other and the most expensive place one of them was renting was less then HALF of what i pay in London. Food was a lot cheaper and almost all medium to high class luxury items were 20-40% cheaper then what you can get in London. Did I say that the food was good? Well it is, really good. Bearing in mind that I was spoiled growing up in Sydney, NYC has food that is approaching that standard, which is something that you almost dream about in England, and indeed most of Europe.
Of course the real downside of living and working in NYC is work itself. The americans have got to where they are today in terms of the worlds economy from working, a lot. In fact they work so much that I really don't understand how they can handle it as they only have 10 days, on average, holiday a year. John pointed out that the lack of holidays just puts more of an emphasis on the weekends, which I certainly noticed in my weekend there, but still, personally I need more time then that.
I wanted to write more but i'm a little pushed for time, I'm currently working out if I'm going to Prague next weekend, Ireland the following before I definitely head off to Iceland the weekend after that ;)
The first thing that I noticed this time around was just how friendly americans really are, they genuinely are interested in just interacting with random people that they meet. I think that London is probably the other extreme where pretty much everyone goes out of their way to avoid having to talk to a stranger. This leads on in part to service. One of my real rants about Europe is that no european that i've ever met in any situation seems to understand what the word actually means, I always get the impression that when you ask for something in most of the shops or restaurants that I frequent the staff think that they are doing you a favour by getting it for you. Americans on the other hand invented the definition of "service", everything is just so friendly and prompt. Sit down at a table in a restaurant and before you've even actually sat down someone is over with a glass of water, smilling, asking about your day and would you like a few minutes or do you know what you want to drink? It's just amazing how much of a difference that kind of service makes EVEN if it is fake, which I actually don't think it is a lot of the time.
Aside from service this time around I really saw a lot of different sides to NYC that I must admit made me think, again, what am I doing in London. It struck me on many occasions that the city seemed to be filled with people ... just like me. That is 30's, professional, travelled and a variety of interests. There weren't crazy crowds of children running around, or even worse, their teenage mothers. Of course NYC does have its downsides as well, most notably the fact that it looks like it's permanently stuck in the 1960's in that the amount of unadorned concrete is just phenomenal.While clean, the concrete all around just makes it feel dirty, which unfortunately does distract from its aethestic appeal. Still, there are amazing places like central park which not only huge, and unlike hyde park, INTERESTING it is also surrounded by some amazing architecture that you really can sit down and admire, while say, playing a game of chess ;)
NYC is cheap. Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. New yorkers themselves sook about the cost of most things, most notably rent, but let me tell you coming from London, the place is seriously cheap. Most of the people I met complained about the rent at one point or the other and the most expensive place one of them was renting was less then HALF of what i pay in London. Food was a lot cheaper and almost all medium to high class luxury items were 20-40% cheaper then what you can get in London. Did I say that the food was good? Well it is, really good. Bearing in mind that I was spoiled growing up in Sydney, NYC has food that is approaching that standard, which is something that you almost dream about in England, and indeed most of Europe.
Of course the real downside of living and working in NYC is work itself. The americans have got to where they are today in terms of the worlds economy from working, a lot. In fact they work so much that I really don't understand how they can handle it as they only have 10 days, on average, holiday a year. John pointed out that the lack of holidays just puts more of an emphasis on the weekends, which I certainly noticed in my weekend there, but still, personally I need more time then that.
I wanted to write more but i'm a little pushed for time, I'm currently working out if I'm going to Prague next weekend, Ireland the following before I definitely head off to Iceland the weekend after that ;)
Thursday, August 31, 2006
The european life
Well it's been a while since I last blogged due partly to the fact that my server that hosts this site fell over but due mainly to the fact that both work and my social life have been very busy.
Two weekends ago I took some time off and headed off to the Basque Country with a colleague from work who comes from there, Zigor. It turns out actually that my colleague has an interesting past as his family, in particular his father was quite famous in Basque due to being the first military head of ETA so you could say that I got a first hand account of the regions politics. History aside the trip was great fun. Firstly getting to hang out with Zigor and chat about non work related things was a pleasant change and the country itself was just gorgeous. The Basque country sits on the border of southern France and nothern spain and I daresay has the best of both worlds, gorgeous beaches on both sides really and some mountains, in the form of the Pyrenees Mountains. In fact on our last day we climbed up the mountain that marks the start of the Pyrenees which gave me an absolutely beautiful view of most of the French seaside and Spanish mountains. Of course language was an issue, the French don't like to speak english even if they can and the spanish generally just can't and as many readers will know, Basque is famous in linguistic circles for being a unique language which is FIENDISHLY hard to understand at all. Consequently I was pretty reliant on Zigor as, naturally, he speaks every language in the region and a few others just to make us native english speakers feel like idiots, something that most euros seem to excel at in my experience. We ran around most of the Basque country by the end of my 4 days, including the capital of Bilbao, San sebastien for a festival and other random places that I can't remember or won't embarass myself by trying to spell. San sebastien was actually really really good. It turns out that in Summer all of the Basque cities have a festival that lasts a week, and being cunning, instead of having that festival on the same date, it is on a different week for each city, meaning that if you time it right there is a festival going on in ONE city at any point in Summer :) While I was there it was San Sebastiens, which is an absolutely gorgeous city down on the coast with one of those settings that you always assume is fabricated it looks so romantic / nice. Well we turned up, along with some of Zigors friends and family and ran into about a million people all out in the streets going off. Given that the city is normally home to about 200k people the influx of people meant that it was bedlam, though in Spanish style which means it was fun. What does take some getting used to though is the hours they keep, we had dinner early at about 2130 and when we left at 0545 that morning it felt like the party was really just starting to get into FULL swing. So my trip to Basque was great, though sleep was at a premium.
Once I got back I had my first prom, Mahlers 5th which was quite spectacular. It's a favourite symphony of mine and the orchestra played it very well. It was quite amusing for me though as the ticket I had bought was considered a fairly expensive one (I thought 22 pounds was quite reasonable for a ticket) and was in one of the exclusive boxes. Of course the exclusive box was filled with exclusive upper class brits who weren't overly thrilled having a thuggish looking aussie sitting in. The "conversations" between movements was hilarious to say the least.
Last weekend I was off again, this time to up to Manchester for a party and then on to Liverpool for the rest of the long weekend. The party absolute blast and I got to meet a lot of people that I game with, we spent most of the weekend arguing about facets of the game and just generally hanging out and having fun. Keeping up with the "northern monkeys" while drinking was a bit painful, but I think I did my heritage justice, though once again sleep was at a premium.
This weekend I have two more proms including some of the real highlights so I'll write again soon and let you all know how they were.
Two weekends ago I took some time off and headed off to the Basque Country with a colleague from work who comes from there, Zigor. It turns out actually that my colleague has an interesting past as his family, in particular his father was quite famous in Basque due to being the first military head of ETA so you could say that I got a first hand account of the regions politics. History aside the trip was great fun. Firstly getting to hang out with Zigor and chat about non work related things was a pleasant change and the country itself was just gorgeous. The Basque country sits on the border of southern France and nothern spain and I daresay has the best of both worlds, gorgeous beaches on both sides really and some mountains, in the form of the Pyrenees Mountains. In fact on our last day we climbed up the mountain that marks the start of the Pyrenees which gave me an absolutely beautiful view of most of the French seaside and Spanish mountains. Of course language was an issue, the French don't like to speak english even if they can and the spanish generally just can't and as many readers will know, Basque is famous in linguistic circles for being a unique language which is FIENDISHLY hard to understand at all. Consequently I was pretty reliant on Zigor as, naturally, he speaks every language in the region and a few others just to make us native english speakers feel like idiots, something that most euros seem to excel at in my experience. We ran around most of the Basque country by the end of my 4 days, including the capital of Bilbao, San sebastien for a festival and other random places that I can't remember or won't embarass myself by trying to spell. San sebastien was actually really really good. It turns out that in Summer all of the Basque cities have a festival that lasts a week, and being cunning, instead of having that festival on the same date, it is on a different week for each city, meaning that if you time it right there is a festival going on in ONE city at any point in Summer :) While I was there it was San Sebastiens, which is an absolutely gorgeous city down on the coast with one of those settings that you always assume is fabricated it looks so romantic / nice. Well we turned up, along with some of Zigors friends and family and ran into about a million people all out in the streets going off. Given that the city is normally home to about 200k people the influx of people meant that it was bedlam, though in Spanish style which means it was fun. What does take some getting used to though is the hours they keep, we had dinner early at about 2130 and when we left at 0545 that morning it felt like the party was really just starting to get into FULL swing. So my trip to Basque was great, though sleep was at a premium.
Once I got back I had my first prom, Mahlers 5th which was quite spectacular. It's a favourite symphony of mine and the orchestra played it very well. It was quite amusing for me though as the ticket I had bought was considered a fairly expensive one (I thought 22 pounds was quite reasonable for a ticket) and was in one of the exclusive boxes. Of course the exclusive box was filled with exclusive upper class brits who weren't overly thrilled having a thuggish looking aussie sitting in. The "conversations" between movements was hilarious to say the least.
Last weekend I was off again, this time to up to Manchester for a party and then on to Liverpool for the rest of the long weekend. The party absolute blast and I got to meet a lot of people that I game with, we spent most of the weekend arguing about facets of the game and just generally hanging out and having fun. Keeping up with the "northern monkeys" while drinking was a bit painful, but I think I did my heritage justice, though once again sleep was at a premium.
This weekend I have two more proms including some of the real highlights so I'll write again soon and let you all know how they were.
Thursday, July 27, 2006
Vocab traps
When I first got to college there was the usual mixture of people from all over Australia and different socio-economic backgrounds. Possibly due to these differences there was a noticeable effort from most people to blend in, which resulted, amoungst other things, in everyone picking up each others vocab. The most notable word that got both myself and a friend (Yes, Benjamin Waters was also bitten) was "dodgy". Dodgy is a great word, from where Benjamin and myself came from it was barely used and consequently had more of an impact when employed by us to make a point. It was also wonderfully ambiguous, I mean dodgy could imply that something was untrustworthy, or that you were skeptical of something, you could even manipulate it to indicate that something wasn't complete or it was just ill favoured. Whatever the reason I shortly found myself using dodgy in almost every sentence and equally alarming after a period of time it just started happening unconciously. I'd find myself having a perfectly interesting conversation but every single time there was a place that I could use "dodgy" I did, and those places were many. In a short space of time both Ben and myself found ourselves saying dodgy so much that it drove each of us mad and we broke each other of the habit shortly there after. Dodgy was a locallized college phenomenon, or so I thought.
Living in England there are a lot of idiosyncracies that I pick up as a foreigner that the Brits themselves don't even notice. Something that i at first put down to just an unusual expression was "To be honest with you...". It seems innocuous, used to possibly draw you into the trust of the person saying it, almost like you're being told something that others are not, but the implications are a little sinister. Obviously if the person is being honest with you when he / she says that it implies that they are NOT being honest with you the rest of the time. So initially it seemed a little odd to me but hey, it wasn't the only Brittish idiosyncracy that was strange. Recently though things have changed. More and more people from more and more different backgrounds (english speaking backgrounds) are starting to use the phrase. In fact it's gotten so bad that its at that endemic level that "dodgy" was for me at college. One of my work colleagues doesn't even notice when he says it anymore and when i started trying to break him of the habit by interupting with a "yeah, be honest with me" every time he said it, he initially freaked out at the frequency he used the phrase and now just subconciously filters out my response and keeps on using it. To be honest with you I expect that these kind of dodgy phrases are like fashion, they dodge in and out of popularity and in a few months time it will be something else, I'll let you know :)
I went to the farnborough airshow last weekend with Eachan. That was a very cool Sunday afternoon trip, though getting there, like travelling anywhere in England, was a serious pain despite the fact that Eachan only lived about 10km from it. It is easy to explain to someone how powerful a jet is in horsepower or some other means of measuring power, but that mental understanding / picture doesn't quite do it justice when it comes to the real thing. Imagine a tiny jet around 1km away on a runway with ~5k people on a field around me. Back another 1km or so is a carpark. Now the jet starts to taxi to the take off run way and the sound it emits is just incredible. People start to look at each other in alarm and begin to make motions about covering their ears. Now the jet finishes it taxi and starts to fire the engines up. Whereas before I was stunned by the sheer power and noise the jet was emitting now I'm just speechless as the seemingly impossibly large noise from before starts to climb up in truely mind numbing degrees. All the babies and children around me are now crying. The jet starts to move. Now all the adults are on their knees with hands clamped over their ears. The jet screams along the run way and takes off. Now every single car alarm in the carpark ~2km away from the jet simultaneously goes off. It's really hard to convey the kind of power that these jets have, your brain struggles to ascribe that much raw energy to the tiny little jet that is now kilometers up in the sky doing all kinds of acrobactic feats that seem to defy not only gravity but the nature of their own propulsion.
I'm not really into planes and the like but I really had an enjoyable day and it was very interesting to me to see that more and more these airshows are about UAVs. Looks like shortly wars will be faught by geeks like me controlling vehicles by computers rather then pilots actually in them. Working for the government would generally be a bad thing but with toys like that I must just be tempted one day :)
Living in England there are a lot of idiosyncracies that I pick up as a foreigner that the Brits themselves don't even notice. Something that i at first put down to just an unusual expression was "To be honest with you...". It seems innocuous, used to possibly draw you into the trust of the person saying it, almost like you're being told something that others are not, but the implications are a little sinister. Obviously if the person is being honest with you when he / she says that it implies that they are NOT being honest with you the rest of the time. So initially it seemed a little odd to me but hey, it wasn't the only Brittish idiosyncracy that was strange. Recently though things have changed. More and more people from more and more different backgrounds (english speaking backgrounds) are starting to use the phrase. In fact it's gotten so bad that its at that endemic level that "dodgy" was for me at college. One of my work colleagues doesn't even notice when he says it anymore and when i started trying to break him of the habit by interupting with a "yeah, be honest with me" every time he said it, he initially freaked out at the frequency he used the phrase and now just subconciously filters out my response and keeps on using it. To be honest with you I expect that these kind of dodgy phrases are like fashion, they dodge in and out of popularity and in a few months time it will be something else, I'll let you know :)
I went to the farnborough airshow last weekend with Eachan. That was a very cool Sunday afternoon trip, though getting there, like travelling anywhere in England, was a serious pain despite the fact that Eachan only lived about 10km from it. It is easy to explain to someone how powerful a jet is in horsepower or some other means of measuring power, but that mental understanding / picture doesn't quite do it justice when it comes to the real thing. Imagine a tiny jet around 1km away on a runway with ~5k people on a field around me. Back another 1km or so is a carpark. Now the jet starts to taxi to the take off run way and the sound it emits is just incredible. People start to look at each other in alarm and begin to make motions about covering their ears. Now the jet finishes it taxi and starts to fire the engines up. Whereas before I was stunned by the sheer power and noise the jet was emitting now I'm just speechless as the seemingly impossibly large noise from before starts to climb up in truely mind numbing degrees. All the babies and children around me are now crying. The jet starts to move. Now all the adults are on their knees with hands clamped over their ears. The jet screams along the run way and takes off. Now every single car alarm in the carpark ~2km away from the jet simultaneously goes off. It's really hard to convey the kind of power that these jets have, your brain struggles to ascribe that much raw energy to the tiny little jet that is now kilometers up in the sky doing all kinds of acrobactic feats that seem to defy not only gravity but the nature of their own propulsion.
I'm not really into planes and the like but I really had an enjoyable day and it was very interesting to me to see that more and more these airshows are about UAVs. Looks like shortly wars will be faught by geeks like me controlling vehicles by computers rather then pilots actually in them. Working for the government would generally be a bad thing but with toys like that I must just be tempted one day :)
Tuesday, July 11, 2006
Law
I've been concerned for sometime about the increasing amount of pressure and control that religion is having on the societies that I live in. This article serves as a nice cautionary tale of the problems that start once you let religion start to dictate laws. I suspect a lot of the problem that many people have is that MOST religious doctrines are not too unreasonable, they are morally sound (by this I mean simply that most people will generally agree with the basic tenets of most religions from a moral perspective ie take the ten commandments) and generally seem to be comprehensible. For most people that is enough for them to give approval to religious ideology even if they are not really religious themselves. Unfortunately religion is not only about generalities but also a lot of specifics, the devil is in the detail as the saying says.
Tuesday, July 4, 2006
Fuel
I've had a few discussions recently about the viability of "alternative" power supplies. I know that a few years ago it simply wasn't viable and while the following article seems to indicate that it is still the case (actually I believe it was always going to be unless there was some fundamental technological breakthrough). That said it really doesn't cite many references so it's a little hard to get real data on the state of alternative power. Has anyone got any decent links / info?
Information Overload
I live hooked into the net, where most information is available in just a few keystrokes. In fact beyond that, now a lot of that information is automatically propagated to me in the form of RSS feeds or emails. For some time I've been struggling with the sheer volume of things being sent my way. There is so much information that I could spend all of my time just reading and trying to keep up with it, certainly it's distracting me from actually DOING things. Initially my response was to try and just ignore it all and batch mode my information acquiring, that is just spend 2 hours in a certain block each day looking up things. Unfortunately that didn't really seem to work very well. Next I thought about some way of tailoring the information that I get, this led to me thinking about trying to work out precisely what information i do want and how I normally go about getting it. Actually over the course of thinking about it I came to some interesting ideas about writing a kind of AI that would pretend to be me and sit on my computer automatically searching the net and then when I sat down in a morning present me with a list of interesting articles and prioritise my email for me to look at. Unsurprisingly others have already thought of such things though at the time of writing this, and from my brief investigations, there was nothing that really struck me as being too good. Still if anyone reading this has a recommendation please leave a comment!
A possible side effect of this information overload is lack of critical thinking. Recently it's struck me how many people are giving considerable amount of credence to fairly spurious arguments, often from the left (not that I think the entire lefts doctrine is spurious, simply that it seems the left are coming up with some increasingly dubious claims). In discussions with friends I stated that I believe this is because that people are so overwhelmed with information that whereas as a child most people are taught to "Get the facts then draw your conclusion" now there are so many facts that people also want the conclusion presented to them.
I feel that I'm starting to win the war on the information now. I'm a lot more selective about what I regularly read and once again the concepts behind open source are leading the fight. Enter reddit and other sites like it. Basically these are sites which users submit links to articles and things of interest that are then rated by all the other users / readers of the site. The higher the rating the higher up the list the article goes so that what you end up with is a self regulated filter of all the interesting things that appear on the net in a given day and the most amazing part about it is that it works. I've had more interesting articles and links of note from reddit in the few weeks that i've been using it then all the other rss feeds I was subscribed to before.
A possible side effect of this information overload is lack of critical thinking. Recently it's struck me how many people are giving considerable amount of credence to fairly spurious arguments, often from the left (not that I think the entire lefts doctrine is spurious, simply that it seems the left are coming up with some increasingly dubious claims). In discussions with friends I stated that I believe this is because that people are so overwhelmed with information that whereas as a child most people are taught to "Get the facts then draw your conclusion" now there are so many facts that people also want the conclusion presented to them.
I feel that I'm starting to win the war on the information now. I'm a lot more selective about what I regularly read and once again the concepts behind open source are leading the fight. Enter reddit and other sites like it. Basically these are sites which users submit links to articles and things of interest that are then rated by all the other users / readers of the site. The higher the rating the higher up the list the article goes so that what you end up with is a self regulated filter of all the interesting things that appear on the net in a given day and the most amazing part about it is that it works. I've had more interesting articles and links of note from reddit in the few weeks that i've been using it then all the other rss feeds I was subscribed to before.
Sports
Working in a betting exchange means that I'm more exposed to sports then I have been in the past. Since giving up on my childhood dream of becoming a professional table tennis player I really havn't paid much attention to sports at all, though I will, given the opportunity, sit down and watch the best of any sport just to see what its like at the highest level.
Living in London, and I dare say anywhere in Europe right now, it's particularly hard not to notice the fact that the world cup is being played. The world cup involves, what most australians would call, soccer. Now I'm reliably told that the world cup is the single largest sporting event anywhere in the world and so you can imagine my surprise when after a bit of investigation I found some an amazing thing out, they don't use technology.
Imagine, in an age where IT is making inroads almost everywhere, in the largest sporting event in the world, there is nothing remotely technologically related. No 3rd umpire, no chips embedded into the balls, no video simulations, absolutely nothing. Now I'm sure the purists would say to me "that's the way it's meant to be Ben, real football", but it's these same purists that are screaming hatred and issuing death threats to the referees that make a bad call during the game causing their favourite team to be knocked out. Now given the seeming importance that soccer has you'd think that people would be using every possible thing that they could to ensure that the winner of the game was the team that played the best soccer rather then some random bad decision made by a single person (yeah and some touch line judges), but that seems to not be the case, in fact, it was suggested by Benjamin Waters that the reason that soccer is so popular is that there is a certain amount of "assyness" about it. I mean let's face it, any sport that decides the "champions" based off one game is more then a little suspect.
Actually where things get interesting is watching the way different sports approach this problem. Soccer, as mentioned, doesn't appear to be doing anything, and while I'm sure I'll get in trouble for saying it, soccer appears to be mostly a south american and european phenomenon, bear that in mind. Now compared to say soccer, we have cricket a typically colonial sport, originally introduced from England to all of its colonies and now generally one of the most popular sports in each of the colonies. Cricket has had a technological revolution in the last 15 years, led mainly out of Australia. New things brought into the game include the "third umpire", video recreations, microphones, additional cameras and sensors. All of these things have substantially, though admitedly not completely, reduced the likliehood of the outcome of a game depending on a decision of a fallible human. In fact Australia has led the way introducing technology to a number of sports, especially tennis. America as well has introduced a lot of technology into their sports, and it could be argued, have a more substantial reason to believe that the champions of their sport are in fact the best team due to often having a series of playoffs rather then it all being decided in one game. Now where this gets interesting is that in my experience if you look at the average level of seriousness in approach to sports Australia and America seem to be well beyond that of say south america and europe. By that I mean simply that the culture / society in Australia and America have less tolerance of losing anything and an expectation that they will win (rightly or wrongly). Thus it's my conclusion that it's likely to be true that most europeans don't want technology in their sports, not because it wouldn't be better but because it would take away a lot of the element of chance and consequently the best chance that most teams have of winning.
Living in London, and I dare say anywhere in Europe right now, it's particularly hard not to notice the fact that the world cup is being played. The world cup involves, what most australians would call, soccer. Now I'm reliably told that the world cup is the single largest sporting event anywhere in the world and so you can imagine my surprise when after a bit of investigation I found some an amazing thing out, they don't use technology.
Imagine, in an age where IT is making inroads almost everywhere, in the largest sporting event in the world, there is nothing remotely technologically related. No 3rd umpire, no chips embedded into the balls, no video simulations, absolutely nothing. Now I'm sure the purists would say to me "that's the way it's meant to be Ben, real football", but it's these same purists that are screaming hatred and issuing death threats to the referees that make a bad call during the game causing their favourite team to be knocked out. Now given the seeming importance that soccer has you'd think that people would be using every possible thing that they could to ensure that the winner of the game was the team that played the best soccer rather then some random bad decision made by a single person (yeah and some touch line judges), but that seems to not be the case, in fact, it was suggested by Benjamin Waters that the reason that soccer is so popular is that there is a certain amount of "assyness" about it. I mean let's face it, any sport that decides the "champions" based off one game is more then a little suspect.
Actually where things get interesting is watching the way different sports approach this problem. Soccer, as mentioned, doesn't appear to be doing anything, and while I'm sure I'll get in trouble for saying it, soccer appears to be mostly a south american and european phenomenon, bear that in mind. Now compared to say soccer, we have cricket a typically colonial sport, originally introduced from England to all of its colonies and now generally one of the most popular sports in each of the colonies. Cricket has had a technological revolution in the last 15 years, led mainly out of Australia. New things brought into the game include the "third umpire", video recreations, microphones, additional cameras and sensors. All of these things have substantially, though admitedly not completely, reduced the likliehood of the outcome of a game depending on a decision of a fallible human. In fact Australia has led the way introducing technology to a number of sports, especially tennis. America as well has introduced a lot of technology into their sports, and it could be argued, have a more substantial reason to believe that the champions of their sport are in fact the best team due to often having a series of playoffs rather then it all being decided in one game. Now where this gets interesting is that in my experience if you look at the average level of seriousness in approach to sports Australia and America seem to be well beyond that of say south america and europe. By that I mean simply that the culture / society in Australia and America have less tolerance of losing anything and an expectation that they will win (rightly or wrongly). Thus it's my conclusion that it's likely to be true that most europeans don't want technology in their sports, not because it wouldn't be better but because it would take away a lot of the element of chance and consequently the best chance that most teams have of winning.
Tuesday, June 27, 2006
Memories
I've always prided myself on my memory. For most of my life I've possessed a borderline photographic short term memory that has enabled me to shortcut my way past many things (school in particular), recently though I've noticed a problem, I seem to have lost it. I think it started when the 'net truly started to take off and increasing amounts of information were stored and readily accessible. I stopped thinking "I must remember that", and instead changed my thinking to "I don't need to fill my brain up with that, I can always look it up if I need to know about it" and slowly, over the last few years I've completely got out of the habit of committing things to memory. It was with some surprise and a considerable amount of concern that recently in some conversations with Benjamin Waters that I noticed my memory is shockingly poor. I'd gone from being able to replay 20 chess games in a row move for move, to some dimwitted drooling idiot that was barely able to remember the contents of the last few books I'd read, even though I had enjoyed them! All of a sudden I felt like I had lost everything that I had done in the past 5 years, that nothing committed to memory at all, I imagine that this is how someone with alzheimer's disease must feel. It wasn't pleasant. I started to reflect precisely what I was in the habit of memorising, and fortunately there was something that I could clearly remember and that was technology related information. I still had an encyclopaedic chunk of knowledge in my head about all things technical in the IT world, but seemingly little outside of it. As you can imagine this situation is not acceptable to me so I've decided to start actually USING my memory again for one thing that I've learnt about memory is that the more you use it the better it gets, for me conclusively proven when I was studying chess and capable of all kinds of fairly strong feats of memory.
On the subject of memory I thought I'd share with you all something that doesn't appear to be as well known as I thought, or rather is only now starting to come into the general publics eye, omega-3. Some time back I read an article saying that scientists had discovered that they had discovered a substance to stimulate new neural pathways, omega-3s. Interestingly enough, or at least to me, no one seemed particular excited about this, I saw almost no follow up articles or a general acceptance of this news. Every time I saw omega-3 concentrates for sale it was always emphasizing its well know benefits on joins and flexibility. Out of curiousity I chatted to one of the guys who I worked with at the time and had a lot of respect for his intellect, upon asking I found out that he has taken omega-3 supplements for most of his life and, curiously, so had his parents. This triggered a memory of my own and I called up my mother and asked her what her father had forced her to have once a week, it was cod liver oil, one of the highest sources of omega-3's known to man. Now very curious I proceded to chat to a number of people both at work and outside that I considered "smart" people, without about 2 exceptions in 14 people I asked, they all took omega-3 supplements. Now I'll freely admit its all anecdotal evidence and hardly scientific but it was more then enough to convince me to try them and so for the past 2 years now I've been taking omega-3 supplements with what I would consider noticeable effects. Despite my complaints above about having a poor memory, it's not entirely correct. My memory is definitely poor when it comes to things that I consider unimportant, but my key memory for things relating to subjects that I do consider important remains very sharp. What's more since taking the omega-3 supplements I almost immediately noticed a clarity to my thoughts that had been absent for some time. With this as a background you can understand my interest when I read this article. While the article has a decidedly (and unfortunately somewhat typical of the left these days) biased doom and gloom leftist bent, it is nonetheless a nice starting point for looking into omega-3 and its an interesting thought that a lot of our current ailments in our society are possibly due to something as simple as nutrition.
I'm off to start regularly playing chess again ;)
On the subject of memory I thought I'd share with you all something that doesn't appear to be as well known as I thought, or rather is only now starting to come into the general publics eye, omega-3. Some time back I read an article saying that scientists had discovered that they had discovered a substance to stimulate new neural pathways, omega-3s. Interestingly enough, or at least to me, no one seemed particular excited about this, I saw almost no follow up articles or a general acceptance of this news. Every time I saw omega-3 concentrates for sale it was always emphasizing its well know benefits on joins and flexibility. Out of curiousity I chatted to one of the guys who I worked with at the time and had a lot of respect for his intellect, upon asking I found out that he has taken omega-3 supplements for most of his life and, curiously, so had his parents. This triggered a memory of my own and I called up my mother and asked her what her father had forced her to have once a week, it was cod liver oil, one of the highest sources of omega-3's known to man. Now very curious I proceded to chat to a number of people both at work and outside that I considered "smart" people, without about 2 exceptions in 14 people I asked, they all took omega-3 supplements. Now I'll freely admit its all anecdotal evidence and hardly scientific but it was more then enough to convince me to try them and so for the past 2 years now I've been taking omega-3 supplements with what I would consider noticeable effects. Despite my complaints above about having a poor memory, it's not entirely correct. My memory is definitely poor when it comes to things that I consider unimportant, but my key memory for things relating to subjects that I do consider important remains very sharp. What's more since taking the omega-3 supplements I almost immediately noticed a clarity to my thoughts that had been absent for some time. With this as a background you can understand my interest when I read this article. While the article has a decidedly (and unfortunately somewhat typical of the left these days) biased doom and gloom leftist bent, it is nonetheless a nice starting point for looking into omega-3 and its an interesting thought that a lot of our current ailments in our society are possibly due to something as simple as nutrition.
I'm off to start regularly playing chess again ;)
Friday, May 12, 2006
A course? Of course!
Well I'm sitting here on a Sourcefire course and I have to say its been great. Not, unfortunately because of the course, which while adequate hasn't been enthralling due largely to the fact that I've spent a lot more time then the instructor using their product on their high end kit, but because its given me time to catch up on a lot of things. Before I wander off onto other subjects it's worth noting that I'm not exactly convinced that giving full Internet access on a training course is actually productive. It's definitely a good thing for me, in that I'm not really learning much and the 'net functions as a conduit for me to do other more productive things (including some work) but for a lot of other people in the room who don't know a thing about Sourcefire they are still sitting here browsing the net and ignoring the instructor. I guess if it wasn't the 'net they'd have found some other way to ignore him.
I've had an interesting couple of weeks. Something that I have discovered is a renewed interest in plays. I was never very interested in plays, I think because I had seen some fairly ordinary ones and as a result hadn't been impressed with the genre. When I first arrived in London I went and saw some plays with some friends, really enjoyed it and determined to do it regularly, that was until I saw another few bad plays and once again got over it. Now I'm back at square one having just seen Blackbird which was an absolutely staggering display of emotion on stage. In a nutshell it is about a paedophillic incident that happened 15 years ago and the confrontation between the two protagonists. What is interesting is that the play manages to take you through BOTH perspectives of the incident, that is not only the revulsion and disgust towards the paedophile, but also through seeing it from his eyes, of a true love and a natural thing. It's great to see such controversial material and it certainly illicited some discussion from the 3 of us that saw the play together.
After seeing Blackbird I was in the mood to see another play and when my mother came and stayed with me for the last few weeks it seemed like a perfect opportunity to do so. My mother picked Embers which was a really enjoyable play to watch, Jeremy Irons plays a very good role, though that is what you'd expect. As is usually the way though, the book is far better then the play, and it is without a doubt the script that makes the play so good. I read embers a few years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it, I think perhaps because it struck a number of notes with me, not the least of them being friendship. Friends are very important to me, and I have a reasonably complex set of thoughts and philosophies around them, embers explores friendship and its definition quite a bit, and in many cases a lot of the ideas express ring very true with me. I'd recommend that if you can go and see the play, but more importantly go read the book.
I'm slowly catching up on my personal emails, so those of you that have written to me recently, I havn't forgotten but I've been working through a backlog, I prefer to write meaningful (or at least semi meaningful) emails as replies then just glib responses so I can't really churn them out that fast, though I noticed I managed to average ~10 or so emails a day for the last week of a personal nature. Part of that frenzy of emailling was related to 9/11.
It came to my attention via Benjamin Waters that the left had a new show piece, Loose Change which is a movie that promotes various conspiracies about 9/11 (note that the movie is about an hour long so be prepared to watch it if you click on that link). Benjamin Waters also wrote some commentary on the movie in an email and sent it out to various friends, a slightly edited version can be found here. In summary there was quite an interesting little discussion about 9/11, politics and the left in general, especially interesting was that the people I referred to the film all found it quite believable and persuasive.
I have a few things more to write about, but as I'm looking to get out of this course early I'd better go and pay some attention :)
I've had an interesting couple of weeks. Something that I have discovered is a renewed interest in plays. I was never very interested in plays, I think because I had seen some fairly ordinary ones and as a result hadn't been impressed with the genre. When I first arrived in London I went and saw some plays with some friends, really enjoyed it and determined to do it regularly, that was until I saw another few bad plays and once again got over it. Now I'm back at square one having just seen Blackbird which was an absolutely staggering display of emotion on stage. In a nutshell it is about a paedophillic incident that happened 15 years ago and the confrontation between the two protagonists. What is interesting is that the play manages to take you through BOTH perspectives of the incident, that is not only the revulsion and disgust towards the paedophile, but also through seeing it from his eyes, of a true love and a natural thing. It's great to see such controversial material and it certainly illicited some discussion from the 3 of us that saw the play together.
After seeing Blackbird I was in the mood to see another play and when my mother came and stayed with me for the last few weeks it seemed like a perfect opportunity to do so. My mother picked Embers which was a really enjoyable play to watch, Jeremy Irons plays a very good role, though that is what you'd expect. As is usually the way though, the book is far better then the play, and it is without a doubt the script that makes the play so good. I read embers a few years ago and thoroughly enjoyed it, I think perhaps because it struck a number of notes with me, not the least of them being friendship. Friends are very important to me, and I have a reasonably complex set of thoughts and philosophies around them, embers explores friendship and its definition quite a bit, and in many cases a lot of the ideas express ring very true with me. I'd recommend that if you can go and see the play, but more importantly go read the book.
I'm slowly catching up on my personal emails, so those of you that have written to me recently, I havn't forgotten but I've been working through a backlog, I prefer to write meaningful (or at least semi meaningful) emails as replies then just glib responses so I can't really churn them out that fast, though I noticed I managed to average ~10 or so emails a day for the last week of a personal nature. Part of that frenzy of emailling was related to 9/11.
It came to my attention via Benjamin Waters that the left had a new show piece, Loose Change which is a movie that promotes various conspiracies about 9/11 (note that the movie is about an hour long so be prepared to watch it if you click on that link). Benjamin Waters also wrote some commentary on the movie in an email and sent it out to various friends, a slightly edited version can be found here. In summary there was quite an interesting little discussion about 9/11, politics and the left in general, especially interesting was that the people I referred to the film all found it quite believable and persuasive.
I have a few things more to write about, but as I'm looking to get out of this course early I'd better go and pay some attention :)
Friday, April 28, 2006
Mobility and media
As a birthday present to my self I recently bought an Archos PMA400. I have to say that this device is very nice and while not my idea of the perfect mobile device, which in my opinion should basically have the full computing power of a server, wireless, digital telephony connections, and long battery life, its not far from it. Aside from being a standard PDA which runs Linux, it has a number of other features including being able to plug into a TV and record any channel and play it back either on the TV or its own screen. While that type of functionality is not unique, especially as the recent trend towards PVRs continues, what is unique is how user friendly and convenient Archos has made it. My pma comes with a cradle that you plug it in and then plug the cables (scart for the euros) into the relevant parts of the TV. Now when you plug it into the cradle it enables an infrared receiver on the cradle and the included full, normal remote control now controls your pma. Even better then that the PMA learns the signals that activate your TV / stereo etc and now you can control ALL the devices via the PMA which sits there and relays stuff back to the relevant device via IR. Battery life, while not as good as I would ideally want it, is enough to play music for 9 hours and videos for 4.5 hours. All in all its fairly amazing and because it runs linux I can support ANY codec I want, including DRM'd if I was so inclined (I'm not) through to the more windows centric and of course all the open source ones. If any of you reading this have any familiarity with OpenPMA then let me know because I think that is the firmware I will try running on it next. So I've got my media player now what?
For a long time I've been uncertain about what to do with the digitalization of media. As a technologist I think its great, I mean its so much easier to list, select and play digital songs / movies then having to swap physical media around. The problem I have is that I'm very particular about the quality of both movies and music as I have spent a small fortune on a good home cinema and I can hear the difference between a 128kb mp3 encoded song and a 192kb one. The obvious solution is to just store everything in a lossless format (that is in its pure unaltered form from the cd / dvd), however, the concern about that is the amount of space that would require. Here the nice thing is, that having procrastinated so long, the amount of storage required, while once infeasible, is now very very affordable. So I decided that I would store all my media in a lossless format and then transcode on the fly any time I wanted to put it onto a more mobile device, like my Archos PMA. I set out to do some research on codecs and media.
The first thing that I discovered was that WAV format, which I had mistakenly thought was a raw music format is actually in fact more of a general container and not specifically for music. As a result of this there are a lot of extra things in a .wav file then you would need for encoding pure music for example. Looking into it further I discovered that FLAC was generally regarded as the best lossless format, the reasons being that it compresses up to 2/3 more then original WAV format, it can be streamed, tagged is completely open source and widely supported for a lossless format. After my investigations I have decided that I will store all my music in FLAC and then transcode them into AAC format for listening on portable devices or where space is an issue, AAC having been chosen after I conducted a number of double blind listening tests to see what my ears prefer. Now it was on to movies.
Storing movies is a lot more problematic then storing music. For starters there is two aspects to any movie, the picture and the sound, and while playing back picture is relatively straightforward, playing back sound can be very complex. The main problem with the sound for my requirements is that often the mechanism that is playing the pictures wants to also process the sound, in my case a computer. The issue with that is that no computer, regardless of how good a sound card, can run my speakers at the necessary requirements as well as my amplifier. This was causing me a lot of problems initially until I realised that I could keep the sound and just allow the mechanism that is playing the pictures to "pass through" the sound to another external decoder, in my case my aplifier. The question then was what was a satisfactory quality?
The question of quality I decided was moot in the end because I will do a similar thing with my movies as I have done with my music, that is I will just keep the full dvd image and when I want to watch the movie on another device I will just transcode it to something else. Now the question is what is the best something else? After doing some research it seems that Divx5 is generally regarded as the best picture codec, however, xvid4 is not far behind. Xvid (divx backwards) is an opensource codec that started off a fair way behind the current codecs at the time but up until the recent release of divx5 was leading the way. Even now, while many think that divx5 is better then the current incarnation of xvid, there are some areas which it would appear to be better, and as a believer in open source I strongly suspect that xvid will shortly regain its crown as the leading codec. Because I support open source and xvid is very widely supported, I will encode all my movies to xvid for use on mobile devices.
So there you have it. My advice to people considering moving their collection of music and movies to pure digital formats is to go out and buy a cheapish SATA raid card and 4 x 300gig hd's. This means that you will about 1 TB of storage which will be more then enough for most peoples entire cd and dvd collection. Store the cd's in FLAC format and the dvd's in a raw image and transcode them into AAC or xvid if you need to play them on more mobile devices.
For a long time I've been uncertain about what to do with the digitalization of media. As a technologist I think its great, I mean its so much easier to list, select and play digital songs / movies then having to swap physical media around. The problem I have is that I'm very particular about the quality of both movies and music as I have spent a small fortune on a good home cinema and I can hear the difference between a 128kb mp3 encoded song and a 192kb one. The obvious solution is to just store everything in a lossless format (that is in its pure unaltered form from the cd / dvd), however, the concern about that is the amount of space that would require. Here the nice thing is, that having procrastinated so long, the amount of storage required, while once infeasible, is now very very affordable. So I decided that I would store all my media in a lossless format and then transcode on the fly any time I wanted to put it onto a more mobile device, like my Archos PMA. I set out to do some research on codecs and media.
The first thing that I discovered was that WAV format, which I had mistakenly thought was a raw music format is actually in fact more of a general container and not specifically for music. As a result of this there are a lot of extra things in a .wav file then you would need for encoding pure music for example. Looking into it further I discovered that FLAC was generally regarded as the best lossless format, the reasons being that it compresses up to 2/3 more then original WAV format, it can be streamed, tagged is completely open source and widely supported for a lossless format. After my investigations I have decided that I will store all my music in FLAC and then transcode them into AAC format for listening on portable devices or where space is an issue, AAC having been chosen after I conducted a number of double blind listening tests to see what my ears prefer. Now it was on to movies.
Storing movies is a lot more problematic then storing music. For starters there is two aspects to any movie, the picture and the sound, and while playing back picture is relatively straightforward, playing back sound can be very complex. The main problem with the sound for my requirements is that often the mechanism that is playing the pictures wants to also process the sound, in my case a computer. The issue with that is that no computer, regardless of how good a sound card, can run my speakers at the necessary requirements as well as my amplifier. This was causing me a lot of problems initially until I realised that I could keep the sound and just allow the mechanism that is playing the pictures to "pass through" the sound to another external decoder, in my case my aplifier. The question then was what was a satisfactory quality?
The question of quality I decided was moot in the end because I will do a similar thing with my movies as I have done with my music, that is I will just keep the full dvd image and when I want to watch the movie on another device I will just transcode it to something else. Now the question is what is the best something else? After doing some research it seems that Divx5 is generally regarded as the best picture codec, however, xvid4 is not far behind. Xvid (divx backwards) is an opensource codec that started off a fair way behind the current codecs at the time but up until the recent release of divx5 was leading the way. Even now, while many think that divx5 is better then the current incarnation of xvid, there are some areas which it would appear to be better, and as a believer in open source I strongly suspect that xvid will shortly regain its crown as the leading codec. Because I support open source and xvid is very widely supported, I will encode all my movies to xvid for use on mobile devices.
So there you have it. My advice to people considering moving their collection of music and movies to pure digital formats is to go out and buy a cheapish SATA raid card and 4 x 300gig hd's. This means that you will about 1 TB of storage which will be more then enough for most peoples entire cd and dvd collection. Store the cd's in FLAC format and the dvd's in a raw image and transcode them into AAC or xvid if you need to play them on more mobile devices.
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Playing catchup
Well it's been a while since I last posted and like in other things I'm currently playing catchup with my blogs. First cab off the rank is philosophy.
I recently turned 30, which is an age that I never thought of myself as being. By that I mean that all my life I've never really planned or thought ahead at all, I'm just interested in the here and now. The biggest surprise of my life in that regard was finishing university. I had, like most of my peers, "mapped" my life from school to uni and then ... well in my case nothing, I had thought that I'd be an acedemic. Of course once I actually got to the end of my honours year I was thoroughly sick of what I had been studying and hacking for 16 hours a day instead. While it was obvious that IT was what I should be doing it was a big wake up call in the sense that for the first time I had to think about something after university, a first. Turning 30 was a similar experience. The age itself doesn't worry me, afterall I've been steadily working towards various things, using my time learning and exploring concepts and ideas and all in all I feel stronger, faster, smarter and more knowledgeable then when I was, say 21. That said 30 was simply an age that I had never thought of in connection with myself. So I decided to take stock of what I was doing with my life and where I wanted to go, so instead of my usual birthday, which for those of you that don't know me is spent wandering around old haunts reminiscing, I went to hampstead heath and thought about the future. For the record I can highly recommend going to Hampstead heath for a walk and a think, it has a great view (something that I think is important for thinking) and it is one of the few places that you can get a bit of space in London. In fact I liked it so much I'm now seriously thinking about moving there shortly.
I spent about 5 hours just walking around thinking, after a particularly good thought I'd sit down for half an hour and write it all down. I approached it from the perspective of what I liked about my life and what I didn't like and what steps I'd need to do to fix the things I didn't like. A lot of what I came up with is a little too personal to put down in a public blog like this but I promised various people I would write up some kind of synthesis so here are the relevant points:
ENJOY
- learning - mastering something - tinkering with computers
- rigorous examination
- perfecting something
- competition
- adventure
- neophilia
- space ( both personal and mental)
- concrete objectives
- nice objects
HATE
- slow thinkers
- repetition
- conformity
- bad physical shape
- lack of accomplishment
- time where nothing is learnt
Finding motivation will come not from just one thing that I enjoy, but should rather come from a combination of things that I enjoy. Long term motivation means more discipline then I am currently enforcing on myself, while doing something that you love is easy, you don't always love it and shying away from something the moment I come across a part of it that I don't love is very counter productive. I should structure my life so that I can achieve goals (see accomplishments). I should also regularly think about what I'm doing and where I'm going and spend time considering possibilities.
Some thoughts on what matches some of the above are things like learning to code well which matches many of the intellectual side of things and doing regular physical activities matches the others. This suggests that it would be very beneficial for me to learn to code and schedule some regular "adventure" type physical activities. Mountaineering, canyoning, skiing and walking all seem appropriate.
So there you have it, motivation and accomplishments were the key for that train of thought. What that all equates to a list of things that I've given myself to work on and regularly check that I'm actually achieving. Again the list is personal but includes things like ensuring that I'm actually going out and socialising as well as getting back in shape.
Actually I'll end it there and make new blog entries for the different topics ;)
I recently turned 30, which is an age that I never thought of myself as being. By that I mean that all my life I've never really planned or thought ahead at all, I'm just interested in the here and now. The biggest surprise of my life in that regard was finishing university. I had, like most of my peers, "mapped" my life from school to uni and then ... well in my case nothing, I had thought that I'd be an acedemic. Of course once I actually got to the end of my honours year I was thoroughly sick of what I had been studying and hacking for 16 hours a day instead. While it was obvious that IT was what I should be doing it was a big wake up call in the sense that for the first time I had to think about something after university, a first. Turning 30 was a similar experience. The age itself doesn't worry me, afterall I've been steadily working towards various things, using my time learning and exploring concepts and ideas and all in all I feel stronger, faster, smarter and more knowledgeable then when I was, say 21. That said 30 was simply an age that I had never thought of in connection with myself. So I decided to take stock of what I was doing with my life and where I wanted to go, so instead of my usual birthday, which for those of you that don't know me is spent wandering around old haunts reminiscing, I went to hampstead heath and thought about the future. For the record I can highly recommend going to Hampstead heath for a walk and a think, it has a great view (something that I think is important for thinking) and it is one of the few places that you can get a bit of space in London. In fact I liked it so much I'm now seriously thinking about moving there shortly.
I spent about 5 hours just walking around thinking, after a particularly good thought I'd sit down for half an hour and write it all down. I approached it from the perspective of what I liked about my life and what I didn't like and what steps I'd need to do to fix the things I didn't like. A lot of what I came up with is a little too personal to put down in a public blog like this but I promised various people I would write up some kind of synthesis so here are the relevant points:
- In order to do accomplish anything then I must be passionate about it. I should focus on doing things that I enjoy while avoiding things that I hate, common sense but easy to get distracted from. The following serves as those lists, though not exhaustive:
ENJOY
- learning - mastering something - tinkering with computers
- rigorous examination
- perfecting something
- competition
- adventure
- neophilia
- space ( both personal and mental)
- concrete objectives
- nice objects
HATE
- slow thinkers
- repetition
- conformity
- bad physical shape
- lack of accomplishment
- time where nothing is learnt
Finding motivation will come not from just one thing that I enjoy, but should rather come from a combination of things that I enjoy. Long term motivation means more discipline then I am currently enforcing on myself, while doing something that you love is easy, you don't always love it and shying away from something the moment I come across a part of it that I don't love is very counter productive. I should structure my life so that I can achieve goals (see accomplishments). I should also regularly think about what I'm doing and where I'm going and spend time considering possibilities.
Some thoughts on what matches some of the above are things like learning to code well which matches many of the intellectual side of things and doing regular physical activities matches the others. This suggests that it would be very beneficial for me to learn to code and schedule some regular "adventure" type physical activities. Mountaineering, canyoning, skiing and walking all seem appropriate.
- Accomplishments can sometimes be smaller things that require little amount of work or perhaps just a moment of inspiration, but more commonly they require serious amounts of work and dedication. I'm not very good at the later and so
I should get in the habit of formulating lists and actively ensure that I am working towards the goals on the list. As part of this there needs to be some form of measurement, a regular litmus test to ensure that I have forward progress, this also helps the feeling of underachievement that often comes after working on something for a long period of time but without finishing it,
even when in many cases you are making big progress (ie learning a language isa very good example of this). I need to accept myself as an accomplishment andnot require any external validation of that. I need to appreciate that without
motivation it is highly unlikely that I will have any accomplishments.
So there you have it, motivation and accomplishments were the key for that train of thought. What that all equates to a list of things that I've given myself to work on and regularly check that I'm actually achieving. Again the list is personal but includes things like ensuring that I'm actually going out and socialising as well as getting back in shape.
Actually I'll end it there and make new blog entries for the different topics ;)
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Time and M$
Not going to write much, but thought I'd share some interesting links with you all. First up is this blog entry, an interesting insight into some of the things going on over at Microsoft. I try to keep my eye on MS and it was with some interest a few months back that I read an article about big changes going on there, it looks like they are not working.
On a different note ben sent me an interesting link to help with time management. Reading it just read like common sense to me, that said its useful to have it crystalized somewhere so I thought I'd link it in case anyone else was interested in such things.
On a different note ben sent me an interesting link to help with time management. Reading it just read like common sense to me, that said its useful to have it crystalized somewhere so I thought I'd link it in case anyone else was interested in such things.
Monday, March 27, 2006
Sleepless sickness
Well it's been a while since I blogged for which I largely blame the combination of an obsessive gaming period and illness. I have been sick probably only twice in the past 10 years and both of those were some time ago, so it was quite a shock to have spent most of last week in bed with some kind of "cold". I say cold because everyone seems to get very upset when I use the word "flu" as they seem to think it implies some near death experience, I'm not convinced as you can tell from my tone, but nonetheless I'll refer to it as a cold. What was really annoying though, was that it co-incided with a bout of insomnia. I sometimes find myself so fired up over something, normally when I'm learning something, that I can barely sleep. This is normally not a problem as it actually helps me learn, but in this case, coupled with the cold it just meant that I couldn't get any sleep to give myself a chance of getting over it so I was pretty unwell for a while. Thankfully though it seems to be over now and I'm back to work and productive things. One annoying thing though is that I seem to have really screwed up my neck over the last few months, I'm not sure what it is by massages and careful placement of my head while I sleep hasn't seemed to help. I guess I'm going to have to go to some specialist but for some reason I have an instinctive aversion to trusting Brittish medical facilities.
Friday, February 24, 2006
Come fly with me we'll fly, lets fly away
Here I am blogging again while 11km up in the sky over the "java sea" (the irony isn't lost on me) doing just under mach 1. I have come to the realisation that the problem with long distance flying is not now lack of options, it's that you don't want to do anything. They still have the antiquated system in place where you need to turn up 3 hours before an international flight, which means that even if your flight was at a reasonable hour, you still had to get up at some horrible time because you had to get to the airport (invariably located a long way away from where you are staying) 3 hours before the flight started. This time round I actually timed how long it took me from when I turned up at the check in desk with no ticket to when I was waiting at the passenger lounge having gone through customs and 2 security checks, total time - 11 minutes. Then I just had to sit down and enjoy Sydneys International airport (Kingford Smith) hospitality, which unsurprising to those of you who use it regularly, sucks badly. To top it off my plane was about 1 hour late leaving Sydney, though I actually prefer that as now I have one hour less to spend in Singapore occupying myself waiting for the London leg of the flight.
Now I'm sitting on the plane wondering if my next flight will have wireless net coverage or if I should use up my remaining time on this one, I think I'll assume that it does and just use up MOST of my time :) I might even try a skype voip conversation shortly and see if the prohibitive rates they charge for making phone calls is a thing of the past once and for all or if the telephone companies are in cahoots with the isp. Fortunately my headphones are still taking me to a world of sonic bliss where I am able to ignore all the crap going on around me. On which note it has to be said travelling with Australians is a good thing, on the whole all Aussies are used to travelling LONG distances and consequently spending long durations travelling, the result is that they are actually a fairly pleasant bunch to travel with, far less annoying then other cultures / socities I often find myself in the company of while travelling.
So here I am, I can do anything on my laptop (well for another 10 hours or so), including things like programming or watching various shows I have downloaded, or I could watch some in flight on demand videos or I could read. In fact I want to do none of the above as I am too tired to really concentrate well and I'd rather just catch up on some sleep, which is also fairly problematic due to the fact that there is drone of jet engines in the background and more annoying, the habit of planes to randomly drop a few feet every 10 minutes or so which sets of your body's sense of equiblium which in turn startles you out of sleep with a vague sense of impending doom. Fun. Perhaps I'll go back to baiting the nearby baby with scary faces (enhanced by my recent shaved head I've found) and generally making myself popular with people who arn't as audibly protected as myself.
Now I'm sitting on the plane wondering if my next flight will have wireless net coverage or if I should use up my remaining time on this one, I think I'll assume that it does and just use up MOST of my time :) I might even try a skype voip conversation shortly and see if the prohibitive rates they charge for making phone calls is a thing of the past once and for all or if the telephone companies are in cahoots with the isp. Fortunately my headphones are still taking me to a world of sonic bliss where I am able to ignore all the crap going on around me. On which note it has to be said travelling with Australians is a good thing, on the whole all Aussies are used to travelling LONG distances and consequently spending long durations travelling, the result is that they are actually a fairly pleasant bunch to travel with, far less annoying then other cultures / socities I often find myself in the company of while travelling.
So here I am, I can do anything on my laptop (well for another 10 hours or so), including things like programming or watching various shows I have downloaded, or I could watch some in flight on demand videos or I could read. In fact I want to do none of the above as I am too tired to really concentrate well and I'd rather just catch up on some sleep, which is also fairly problematic due to the fact that there is drone of jet engines in the background and more annoying, the habit of planes to randomly drop a few feet every 10 minutes or so which sets of your body's sense of equiblium which in turn startles you out of sleep with a vague sense of impending doom. Fun. Perhaps I'll go back to baiting the nearby baby with scary faces (enhanced by my recent shaved head I've found) and generally making myself popular with people who arn't as audibly protected as myself.
Friday, February 17, 2006
Australia
Well I'm back in Australia. It hasn't even been a year since I was last here and I'm back again, the reason, Best man at my friend Adam Skovron's wedding. I have decided that I won't be coming back for a couple of years so I took off 3 weeks and have made a real trip of it this time, even to the extent of not spending a few days in Japan like I wanted to, so that I can catch up with everyone that I wanted to see (i'm not quite there yet, but I'm close!). I find it really interesting seeing Australia now, it doesn't feel like home, London doesn't either for that matter, and whatever ties I once had here are now only in the form of memories. There are some key differences that I've noticed this time around though.
The sun. You just can't explain it to someone who hasn't spent time in the Australian sun. People from other sunny parts of the world think they know, but they still don't, the sun in Australia is harsh, really harsh. Sydney still sits underneath the hole in the ozone and you can actually discern a clear difference standing out in it. Yesterday I decided to walk into the city over the harbour bridge. I looked out the window from my mothers apartment (in Milsons Point) and saw an overcast day and so left my sun glasses at home and didn't bother with sun screen. I left the apartment and start walking, I had just started to cross the harbour bridge when the sun said "theres ben! rare spot! kill him" and the clouds parted and the sun light washed over me. I guess that I was walking for about 13-18 minutes in the sun all up by the time I arrived at my destination. I was absolutely soaked with perspiration and, predictably, thoroughly sun burnt. For those of you that don't know I have recently decided to act on an age old promise to myself, where I always stated that when I got to the point with my hair that I had a bald patch on top and I personally thought it looked stupid I would just shave it all off, which is precisely what I did. Personally I don't think that it looks too bad, but what little protection I had gained before from my strategically placed hair has now vanished and as a consequence I currently look like a beetroot. I look around and see everyone, even the "geeks", are brown. You just can't help it over here, if you move around in the sun at all, then you will be brown. Interestingly though, it doesn't look healthy to me, it looks in fact, like they are being slowly spit roasted by the Australian sun. It's no wonder that Australia has the highest rate of skin cancer in the world.
Something else that I found interesting was the cost of things. You'd think that living in London that I could rightly expect that everything was cheaper, pretty much regardless of what it was, or at the very least food. Food is something that Australia unquestionably has it better then London. There is an abudance of top quality fresh produce that London can just never match and so even when the chef isn't that good, the fact that all the produce is so good makes up for it and you are still left with a decent meal, but if you can get a good chef, then its heaven. So you could say that food was something that I was really looking forward to, and it hasn't let me down, but what was interesting was checking out the prices. It's still accurate to say that the cheapest meals in Sydney are less then half the price of something comparable in London, that is that it is still possible to eat well for AUD $10. That is not really possible in London. It is also fair to say that if you want to go and drop 200 pounds per person on a meal that you actually can't spend that much (short of alcohol) in Australia, but what has changed is the middle of the road meal. In London I regularly dine out, so I can comfortably say that a nice meal will normally cost you around 10-18 pounds, depending on whether you are having entres or not. I can now say after eating out pretty much exclusively since I arrived at all kinds of places that the cost is very similar now in Sydney, and, in some cases its even more expensive. It really took me as a surprise, I don't object to paying a little more but it really shattered the image of Australia being cheap in my mind.
Body culture. It's the largest difference between the Australian population and that of any in Europe, especially England. When I walk around in England you notice that many people while not overweight, are definitely well padded. On the whole it means that the guys look fairly big and the women quite curvy (i'm not complaining mind you!). When you walk around Australia though, you notice that neither the guys nor the women have ANY excess body fat. The result is that the guys all look muscle bound, simply because you can actually see their muscles, which in most cases are actually quite small, but I was so used to not seeing any muscles (ie I can't think of one person at work who strikes me as being "muscley") so I had this feeling that I was walking around surrounded by people that live in the gym. The women are noticibly hotter on average then their european counterparts, but again you can almost see the obsession with their appearence and the effort it takes to keep themselves looking like they do. It's a testamount to the difference that weather plays in profile of an average citizen. The final thing of note is about perspective.
Most city people, regardless of which city it is in the world (at least in my experience) are happy to tell you about how different they are from their "country" brethren, normally heavilly laced with quips and derogatory observations about how the country folk are slow, dumb or even inbred. In many cases it is true, not that there is necessarily anything intrinsically wrong with country people, or living in the country for that matter, but simply that there is a measurable difference in the average opinion on many topics and a slightly slower pace of life. What I found interesting this time around is that I now see such a difference between people that I know that have lived in many large cities and those that havn't left, for example, Sydney. Living in London (but the concept is applicable to any other large city) is very different from living in Sydney. The easiest explanation is of course culture and population and that is very true, but there are also different psychologies at work and different approaches of the government and businesses as well. The result of all of this in my opinion is that if you live in a few different large cities you generate a kind of "meta-city" person, someone that has adapted to live in ANY city, which means a very open mind, that has been forced to see things from a number of perspectives. This time around i've noticed that a number of the people that I've chatted with seem to be really stuck in the "Sydney' frame of mind, where their only reference and the only meaningful perspective for them is that of a Sydneysider. While living in the country or just one city is not a bad thing, it does seem to mean that you have to work harder to not get stuck in a given frame of mind, especially where in a country like Australia, all the media is controlled by one or two people. It almost raises the question to what extent are we already generating populaces in the image that the governments want via popular media.
The sun. You just can't explain it to someone who hasn't spent time in the Australian sun. People from other sunny parts of the world think they know, but they still don't, the sun in Australia is harsh, really harsh. Sydney still sits underneath the hole in the ozone and you can actually discern a clear difference standing out in it. Yesterday I decided to walk into the city over the harbour bridge. I looked out the window from my mothers apartment (in Milsons Point) and saw an overcast day and so left my sun glasses at home and didn't bother with sun screen. I left the apartment and start walking, I had just started to cross the harbour bridge when the sun said "theres ben! rare spot! kill him" and the clouds parted and the sun light washed over me. I guess that I was walking for about 13-18 minutes in the sun all up by the time I arrived at my destination. I was absolutely soaked with perspiration and, predictably, thoroughly sun burnt. For those of you that don't know I have recently decided to act on an age old promise to myself, where I always stated that when I got to the point with my hair that I had a bald patch on top and I personally thought it looked stupid I would just shave it all off, which is precisely what I did. Personally I don't think that it looks too bad, but what little protection I had gained before from my strategically placed hair has now vanished and as a consequence I currently look like a beetroot. I look around and see everyone, even the "geeks", are brown. You just can't help it over here, if you move around in the sun at all, then you will be brown. Interestingly though, it doesn't look healthy to me, it looks in fact, like they are being slowly spit roasted by the Australian sun. It's no wonder that Australia has the highest rate of skin cancer in the world.
Something else that I found interesting was the cost of things. You'd think that living in London that I could rightly expect that everything was cheaper, pretty much regardless of what it was, or at the very least food. Food is something that Australia unquestionably has it better then London. There is an abudance of top quality fresh produce that London can just never match and so even when the chef isn't that good, the fact that all the produce is so good makes up for it and you are still left with a decent meal, but if you can get a good chef, then its heaven. So you could say that food was something that I was really looking forward to, and it hasn't let me down, but what was interesting was checking out the prices. It's still accurate to say that the cheapest meals in Sydney are less then half the price of something comparable in London, that is that it is still possible to eat well for AUD $10. That is not really possible in London. It is also fair to say that if you want to go and drop 200 pounds per person on a meal that you actually can't spend that much (short of alcohol) in Australia, but what has changed is the middle of the road meal. In London I regularly dine out, so I can comfortably say that a nice meal will normally cost you around 10-18 pounds, depending on whether you are having entres or not. I can now say after eating out pretty much exclusively since I arrived at all kinds of places that the cost is very similar now in Sydney, and, in some cases its even more expensive. It really took me as a surprise, I don't object to paying a little more but it really shattered the image of Australia being cheap in my mind.
Body culture. It's the largest difference between the Australian population and that of any in Europe, especially England. When I walk around in England you notice that many people while not overweight, are definitely well padded. On the whole it means that the guys look fairly big and the women quite curvy (i'm not complaining mind you!). When you walk around Australia though, you notice that neither the guys nor the women have ANY excess body fat. The result is that the guys all look muscle bound, simply because you can actually see their muscles, which in most cases are actually quite small, but I was so used to not seeing any muscles (ie I can't think of one person at work who strikes me as being "muscley") so I had this feeling that I was walking around surrounded by people that live in the gym. The women are noticibly hotter on average then their european counterparts, but again you can almost see the obsession with their appearence and the effort it takes to keep themselves looking like they do. It's a testamount to the difference that weather plays in profile of an average citizen. The final thing of note is about perspective.
Most city people, regardless of which city it is in the world (at least in my experience) are happy to tell you about how different they are from their "country" brethren, normally heavilly laced with quips and derogatory observations about how the country folk are slow, dumb or even inbred. In many cases it is true, not that there is necessarily anything intrinsically wrong with country people, or living in the country for that matter, but simply that there is a measurable difference in the average opinion on many topics and a slightly slower pace of life. What I found interesting this time around is that I now see such a difference between people that I know that have lived in many large cities and those that havn't left, for example, Sydney. Living in London (but the concept is applicable to any other large city) is very different from living in Sydney. The easiest explanation is of course culture and population and that is very true, but there are also different psychologies at work and different approaches of the government and businesses as well. The result of all of this in my opinion is that if you live in a few different large cities you generate a kind of "meta-city" person, someone that has adapted to live in ANY city, which means a very open mind, that has been forced to see things from a number of perspectives. This time around i've noticed that a number of the people that I've chatted with seem to be really stuck in the "Sydney' frame of mind, where their only reference and the only meaningful perspective for them is that of a Sydneysider. While living in the country or just one city is not a bad thing, it does seem to mean that you have to work harder to not get stuck in a given frame of mind, especially where in a country like Australia, all the media is controlled by one or two people. It almost raises the question to what extent are we already generating populaces in the image that the governments want via popular media.
Sunday, February 5, 2006
Technology penetration
Well its finally happened, I'm writing this blog from 10km up in the sky currently over the Black Sea at little under mach 1, and as you can plainly tell, I'm on the net! I must admit I was pretty sceptical when, bleary eyed, waiting to get on the damn plane this morning I was greeted by two attactive lasses who tried to give me some cards, and were muttering what I took to be something for sale. My normal scepticism almost cost me the best freebie I've had in a while, one free hour of wireless net access on my flight. Of course, as a geek I normally find it hard to engage women and ask for favours, but with the right incentive I've found that its quite easy... needless to say I now have enough net access to make my flight bearable :) Its not blisteringly fast, but its actually far far better then I thought it would be, perhaps at about ISDN speed, maybe even slightly faster just with an unusually high latency of around 2 seconds or so, which I assume is the time taken for it to bounce of various satellites.
On a different note I recently bought a pair of new ear phones, or more accurately, in canal ear phones. The concept of the in ear phones is simple, put the sound as close as possible to the ear drum directly by making you insert the head phones into your canal, it sounds a little odd, but after a few attempts you get used to it (for those of you, who like my father, panic about the idea of putting anything into your ears and the consequences of loud bursts of noise from your audio source, you needn't be worried as it comes with a sound filter that will block out any loud spikes in the audio feed). The benefits of doing this are that you need less power to drive the speakers and the speakers can be smaller, there is much more clarity as there is no interference due to sound traveling through the air. What this also means is that you effectively make a seal by inserting the ear phones, which means, you guessed it a MASSIVE reduction in back ground noise. This is the key thing on a flight, I'm sitting here surrounded by people talking, babies screaming and some lovely big Royles Royce engines and I can only hear Beethovens 9th symphony. Bliss, no really, its fucking bliss I have my own private world of sound. There are other benefits as well, most ear "buds" are actually detrimental to your ears, primarily because they don't block out ambient background noise and result in the user turning up the volume to drown it out and thus causing long term hearing damage. Due to the fact that the speakers are so close to my ear drums and the seal I lose about ~30db of background noise, meaning that I have to turn down the ear phones in order for it to be comfortable, from my reading it would appear that the in canal ear phones are actually the best of ALL the different personal speakers you can get for your long term hearing.
So you'd think with my ear phones, and wireless net connection I'd be able to amuse myself, and you'd be right. What's even more amazing though is that I am still spoilt for choice, I have on demand movies, not the normal timered, 4 or 5 heavily edited movies, but a solid 150 all of which I can play when and how I want. I just watched the "Edukators" are really good german art film which I meant to catch when it was at the cinemas a few months back but that caught my eye when flicking through the on demand movies.
Now if the plane doesn't drop out of the sky I might JUST be able to have a pleasant flight :)
On a different note I recently bought a pair of new ear phones, or more accurately, in canal ear phones. The concept of the in ear phones is simple, put the sound as close as possible to the ear drum directly by making you insert the head phones into your canal, it sounds a little odd, but after a few attempts you get used to it (for those of you, who like my father, panic about the idea of putting anything into your ears and the consequences of loud bursts of noise from your audio source, you needn't be worried as it comes with a sound filter that will block out any loud spikes in the audio feed). The benefits of doing this are that you need less power to drive the speakers and the speakers can be smaller, there is much more clarity as there is no interference due to sound traveling through the air. What this also means is that you effectively make a seal by inserting the ear phones, which means, you guessed it a MASSIVE reduction in back ground noise. This is the key thing on a flight, I'm sitting here surrounded by people talking, babies screaming and some lovely big Royles Royce engines and I can only hear Beethovens 9th symphony. Bliss, no really, its fucking bliss I have my own private world of sound. There are other benefits as well, most ear "buds" are actually detrimental to your ears, primarily because they don't block out ambient background noise and result in the user turning up the volume to drown it out and thus causing long term hearing damage. Due to the fact that the speakers are so close to my ear drums and the seal I lose about ~30db of background noise, meaning that I have to turn down the ear phones in order for it to be comfortable, from my reading it would appear that the in canal ear phones are actually the best of ALL the different personal speakers you can get for your long term hearing.
So you'd think with my ear phones, and wireless net connection I'd be able to amuse myself, and you'd be right. What's even more amazing though is that I am still spoilt for choice, I have on demand movies, not the normal timered, 4 or 5 heavily edited movies, but a solid 150 all of which I can play when and how I want. I just watched the "Edukators" are really good german art film which I meant to catch when it was at the cinemas a few months back but that caught my eye when flicking through the on demand movies.
Now if the plane doesn't drop out of the sky I might JUST be able to have a pleasant flight :)
Thursday, January 26, 2006
Accurate Cold
It has recently got a little colder in Europe, which has resulted in the usual round of eveyone complaining about how cold it is and how out of character for this time of year etc etc. The fact that it is the middle of Winter and the coldest time of the year and only recently dropped below 3 degrees celcius seems to have escaped them, I mean if its not meant to be cold at this time of the year when is it? Of course the answer is, that most people NEVER want it to be cold, but I'm getting used to that idea now after being subjected to it for 29 years. What I find it really hard to get used to is that the various news agencies around the world are buying into the cold mania and losing all ability to give accurate reports. A good example is the recent Russian "cold snap".
It seems that around a week or so ago Russia, or more accurately, the Moscow region was subjected to unusually cold weather. The weather was so bad that many people died from freezing to death and all kinds of emergency measures were brought into place. I don't for a moment suggest that this was not the case, but what I found interesting was the disparity of reporting on the event. This disparity fell into two main categories. The first, was the difference in recorded temperature. A friend of mine said that he read in the German media that it reached -39 degrees celcius, a quick search on the net found this article which says -24 degrees, this article that says -31 and yet another article that doesn't give a precise temperature at all. I find it absolutely amazing that these articles, most from fairly reputable news sources can have such a discrepancy about the temperature of Moscow, the largest city in Russia, but it doesn't end there.
The second way in which things differ from article to article is of course the records. Society now seems fascinated with records. Every day we have to beat more and more records and something isn't viewed as news worthy unless it does so. I guess with that in mind it should come as no surprise that almost every article about the cold weather seems to feel a need to mention how it breaks some kind of record. What was amusing to me was that once again, despite a large chunk of evidence and recorded fact each report comes up with differing "coldest day in Moscow" and how, depending on the widely varying temperature that it was on those days, how it was broken or almost broken. How can it possibly be that there is such disagreement about an event that happened a few days ago, in a large city? I suspect the answer ties into the fact that almost all europeans seem to be fixated on the weather and the natural human tendancy to exaggerate.
While I'm on the subject of cold weather, perhaps a reader can explain to me why the following (admittedly a somewhat unsavoury topic but nonetheless curious) seems to never occur, visible farts. I've lived in some colder part of the world for a while now, certainly I've been in weather that was cold enough to freeze breath very often and yet i've noticed that you never, ever, see anyones farts. This was highlighted to me recently as I was standing at a bus stop with one other person in front of me with his back to me. I quite audibly heard the guy fart, but despite being a sub zero day, was unable to see a thing. The only explanation I was able to come up with is that breath was visible due to the moisture content and perhaps farts were invisible as they did not have enough moisture. I asked a few canadian friends of mine about the subject and (after the laughing stopped) they too were also unable to remember ever "seeing" a fart, despite the fact that where they grew up it was below freezing for vast amounts of the year. Please leave a comment if you think you know the answer to this conundrum :)
It seems that around a week or so ago Russia, or more accurately, the Moscow region was subjected to unusually cold weather. The weather was so bad that many people died from freezing to death and all kinds of emergency measures were brought into place. I don't for a moment suggest that this was not the case, but what I found interesting was the disparity of reporting on the event. This disparity fell into two main categories. The first, was the difference in recorded temperature. A friend of mine said that he read in the German media that it reached -39 degrees celcius, a quick search on the net found this article which says -24 degrees, this article that says -31 and yet another article that doesn't give a precise temperature at all. I find it absolutely amazing that these articles, most from fairly reputable news sources can have such a discrepancy about the temperature of Moscow, the largest city in Russia, but it doesn't end there.
The second way in which things differ from article to article is of course the records. Society now seems fascinated with records. Every day we have to beat more and more records and something isn't viewed as news worthy unless it does so. I guess with that in mind it should come as no surprise that almost every article about the cold weather seems to feel a need to mention how it breaks some kind of record. What was amusing to me was that once again, despite a large chunk of evidence and recorded fact each report comes up with differing "coldest day in Moscow" and how, depending on the widely varying temperature that it was on those days, how it was broken or almost broken. How can it possibly be that there is such disagreement about an event that happened a few days ago, in a large city? I suspect the answer ties into the fact that almost all europeans seem to be fixated on the weather and the natural human tendancy to exaggerate.
While I'm on the subject of cold weather, perhaps a reader can explain to me why the following (admittedly a somewhat unsavoury topic but nonetheless curious) seems to never occur, visible farts. I've lived in some colder part of the world for a while now, certainly I've been in weather that was cold enough to freeze breath very often and yet i've noticed that you never, ever, see anyones farts. This was highlighted to me recently as I was standing at a bus stop with one other person in front of me with his back to me. I quite audibly heard the guy fart, but despite being a sub zero day, was unable to see a thing. The only explanation I was able to come up with is that breath was visible due to the moisture content and perhaps farts were invisible as they did not have enough moisture. I asked a few canadian friends of mine about the subject and (after the laughing stopped) they too were also unable to remember ever "seeing" a fart, despite the fact that where they grew up it was below freezing for vast amounts of the year. Please leave a comment if you think you know the answer to this conundrum :)
Thursday, January 12, 2006
RSS feeds - engadget
As many of you know, I'm a huge RSS fan. I think its the easiest way to stay abreast of information that I have seen. One feed that I am becoming more and more attached to is engadget. While I've been following engadget for some time now, recently I've found that it's just about superceding all my old technology related feeds like slashdot. So while I havn't given up on some of my other feeds just yet, I whole heartedly recommend engadget to anyone that is even vaguely interested in technology.
Monday, January 9, 2006
Nice resource - reviews
Every now and again I stumble on some really nice resources while browsing the net. Today I found Consumer Research. This site has reviews of pretty much any topic that you could imagine, from geek stuff to non geek topics. What's great about it is that they all (at least the ones I checked / read were) up to date, being no older then 3 months, and had a thoughtful, non biased collections of facts and noted down general opinion. As an example I am looking to buy some new headphones and reading the review, had a list of the top scorers in each category from all the reputable reviewers (eg forbes, cnet, amazon, tomshardware, anandtech, audiophile sites), the prices for all of them, and it even contained observations on them from the comments by buyers from ebay and amazon! This site just made my bookmarks.
Saturday, January 7, 2006
Lasers
I just saw an article on engadget about a new laser. This one is seriously kewl though as it actually does what you'd expect from a laser, ie transmits heat! This means that you can use this laser for doing things like, bursting balloons, igniting flammable things and of course, burning people! Check out their selection at this website.
Wednesday, January 4, 2006
Achieving
For most of my life I've felt like I am meant to achieve something. In all likliehood its the result of being an only child with a doting mother combined with excessive competitive drive, but whatever the reason I feel an urge to do something. Of course the tricky part is working out what that "something" actually is. I've had various ideas, some of which I'm actively working on, most of which have just gone by the way side for various reasons but I did find a very interesting article the other day which I think is a nice synthesis of my various problems and thoughts about the topic.
Christmas
Well I must admit that I didn't get all that I wanted to done this Christmas, but nonetheless, I don't consider it a complete failure. It's becoming a bit of a tradition for me to spend Christmas by myself concentrating on learning something new. The reasoning for chosing christmas is that it is a time of year that has no meaning for me but that seems to occupy almost everyone else around me, meaning that I am left unbothered by interuptions and able to get on with things that take a lot of time and concentration, something that I don't normally (or at least recently) have much of an opportunity to do. This time I decided to teach myself how to code in Python, given that three years ago I spend my entire Christmas break learning how to code c (I wrote a proxy server, nothing exciting but it was a learning curve for me given that I couldn't code a thing before that.). Well I met with some success, I managed to read most of a python book and have a fairly good understanding of Pythons strengths and weaknesses and also a reasonable understanding of how to get things done. Of course the main point, that being actual coding seems to have escaped me, as instead I saw myself spending a lot of time just relaxing and watching a series of relatively bad movies. While that is a little annoying, in the overall scheme of things I think it might have been the right thing to do as it seems to have allowed me time to reflect on a few things and to really recharge. I'm looking forward to getting stuck into a few projects in the next year.
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