How to shop!

Coming back to Australia after living in London for 7 years was an eye opener into tariffs and duties. Typically people tend to think of London as being very expensive, which it is, but what many people don’t realize is that Sydney is comparable, and for many things, even more expensive. The main reasons for the high cost of buying general retail goods in Australia are tariffs and duties, and it appears that people are generally ignorant about what they are and why they are in place, so I thought I'd write a quick post about it, not to explain all the economics behind it, but simply to point a few things out. This ignorance about tariffs was highlighted when I recently bought my Boxee box and read the outrage on their forums about the different costs of the unit all over the world. I’ll use the boxee box as an example for the confusion.

The boxee box was initially selling for $199 USD in the US, 199 pounds in the UK, and $300 AUD in Australia, to name just 3 of the discrepancies. The boxee forums were in an uproar, as very few people seemed to understand that you can’t just sell an item at the same price all over the world. I won’t go into the economics of it all, but basically every country has it’s own set of tariff’s, duties and taxes, for example the UK has VAT, Australia the GST, then you have the government trying to protect local industries in some cases incurring additional tariffs and the like to try and "level the playing field". Then you have shipping, which is relevant to a place like Australia and last but not least you have what the local market will bear, in the case of both the UK and Australia, they are both used to paying over the odds for the majority of “luxury” items bought, and thus distributors have learnt to take advantage of this and put an additional premium on top. This has reached a point where recently I was looking to buy some climbing gear from Wild Country. Wild Country is a welsh company, that manufactures locally. Amusingly the cost of their products at discounted stores in the UK, was still ~25% more expensive then going to online stores in the US. How’s that for duties and leveraging what the market will bear?

Ofcourse the solution to this is obvious to most people, buy it where it’s cheapest and then ship it to wherever you are! In most cases, for luxury goods, that means buy it in the US. Now interestingly, in Australia, unless something costs more then $1000AUD, you can bring it into the country without any additional taxes or duties, which in effect means that once you cross a threshold of cost where the savings from buying it in America plus the cost of shipping is less then buying it locally, you’re ahead. That mark is typically at around ~$130AUD, which ofcourse means that the majority of things that most people buy would be cheaper to buy from oversea’s. Now I’m hardly the first to note this, and thus enterprising individuals have started business models around this, for example check out www.myus.com, which gives members a US address (many US stores refuse to ship internationally, supposedly due to fraud issues, more commonly because they have agreements with their suppliers who want to ensure that their local distributors have the market cornered), will repackage all parcels, stripping unnecessary packaging, and then collate a number of parcels into one shipment all for express delivery leveraging their scale to get reduced rates from various couriers. All in all I’m absolutely astounded that more Australian’s don’t buy from oversea’s, I guess it’s just the relative lack of net savvy that pervades over here that is the cause, that and concerns around getting “support” for the product you buy in the event that there is a problem.

All of this has recently started to be brought to the attention of the public as local retailers are starting to complain about being unable to compete, and there is now a campaign underway to try and lower the threshold of where duties and tariffs are applied. My advice to anyone living outside of the US, buy what you're after sooner rather then later!

art

I stumbled across this article today. Definitely worth a read and it resonated very strongly with me. I can still remember arguing with my math teacher about the value of what we were being taught and how we were being taught. Actually I'd go so far as to say it sums up why I have a problem with our education system.

Economical media

I recently decided to grow my movie collection buy purchasing all the old classic movies that I've wanted to watch on and off over the years but had never bought. I was spurred to do this because while looking around for a few things I'd noticed that the cost of dvds had fallen to ~5 pounds. So I dutifully hopped on my computer and went to play.com to start putting in a big order for all the classic movies. It was only because earlier in the day I'd inadvertently wandered through a HMV store and seen some sale dvds for 4.99 that I thought I'd quickly check their website as well. Much to my surprise, pretty much EVERY movie I checked was cheaper on HMV then play! Now let me put that in perspective for those readers that don't really know the two companies involved. Play was a company setup in Jersey because of it's tax breaks when selling to the UK mainland. As a result they were able to offer incredibly cheap prices on cds / dvds that I don't think it's too far to say, probably led the charge in lowering prices on the high street. HMV on the other hand is the polar opposite, it's the largest dvd / cd selling in the UK with stores on all the high streets and, till recently, high street prices. It gives you an idea of how far things have changed when a company like Play can't beat HMV on price.

Recruiters and the job hunt

The last two weeks since I've come back from Italy have seen me spending the majority of my time looking for a new job. This in turn has meant that I've spent the majority of my time each day chatting to recruiters. It's funny what proximity will do for perspective, normally recruiters are reviled by most people and while I have my issues with them, which I'll deal with later, on the whole I mostly feel sympathy for them right now, let me explain.
Currently most of my effort is going towards getting into the financial sector, in particular investment banks. Now investment banks typically have a fairly hefty dose of self importance at the best of times, but when it comes to recruiters I get the impression that they basically think of them as being scum. It's an unfortunately reality that most people, at least in IT, think of recruiters as scum and when you combine IT, with investment bank attitude you end up with no respect for the recruiter. What I've discovered is that it directly effects me. An example of this is where I'll get contacted about a role. The recruiter will go through it with me, come to the conclusion that I'm perfect for the role and put me forward. At this point the recruiter tells me that they normally hear back within 2 days whether the company will want an interview. Two days go by and the recruiter contacts me, telling me that he's talked to the HR department of the company and they are busy, "you know still sub prime fallout", and that they'll review my CV in the next two days and get back to him. Two days go by and the recruiter contacts me and tells me that HR are still busy and .... you see the pattern. The problem is that the poor recruiter has to deal with me calling him up asking what the status is, has he really put my CV forward, why haven't we heard anything back, is it really HR and not someone technical reviewing my CV etc. At the same time the recruiter is strung along by the bank giving him false information which they, unbeknowingly, pass on to me causing me in turn to get frustrated. All in all it's hard not to have some sympathy for the recruiters, they cop it from both sides and generally don't get much respect. Of course there is the flip side as well.
I understand that recruiters are not technical people, and that HR at the company you're applying to is equally not technical, but you'd think if it was your job to assess people with a certain skillset that you might learn how to do it with some level of accuracy, after all it helps everyone involved. You can imagine my surprise then when time after time I have to sit there and explain that I do know how to install linux right after I've explained that I'm a linux developer. You can view my resume here and see if it comes across as someone who has little to no knowledge about unix or security. In the last 2 weeks I've had to create 5 versions of my CV to "emphasize" different aspects of CV so that it will get past the recruiter / HR filters before going to someone that will actually understand it. Emphasizing sounds reasonable enough, until you realize what this actually entails is not rewriting it with a particular focus, nothing so complex! No, emphasizing simply means replace all occurances of "implement" with "build" because the client wants to know that you can build a linux box. Another tip for recruiters or HR is to google your candidates. If you're going for a serious IT role, by serious I mean any role that involves you having years of experience or a senior level of understanding, then googling their name will turn up hits on them, from emails they've written to mailling lists through to articles that they've published on different topics. If there isn't any hits, then you should be concerned, of course on the flip side if there is then it's a good indication that they are the real deal and not making up their skillset. Finally something that I understand but that annoys me is the insistance of people asking "so what was your package in your last job?". Frankly what relevance does this have if the recruiter / HR department is doing their job properly? What they use it for is to get a base from which to judge what kind of salary they should offer you for the role you are going for. Funnily enough it was my understanding that HRs point in life was to assess peoples suitability for a role, on the assumption that they are suitable then they are worth what the budget for the role is worth.

Spam

Lots of people I know get really worked up about spam. For a long time I have to admit that I didn't get much spam, which was a bit odd really, given that for a very long time various email addresses of mine have been all over the net, still I guess I used to be a lot more careful about joining lists or the like. Now for the last 5 years or so I've been getting a lot of spam, the funny thing is though that it doesn't really bother me. Like anyone I do resent the time lost having to scan my emails, check the senders address and the subject (that's about all it takes for me to classify something as spam, since most of the mails I get are either tagged by a list or by a sender known to me) and delete the spam, but I can't help but feel that is just the way things are and in a funny kind of way, as it should be. I think the heart of my view on spam is quite simple and I feel logical. The Internet is a PUBLIC network. Think about that for a moment, it means that anyone has the right to use it. If you run a service on a public network, that implies that the public are allowed to use that service. So when I put it in those terms to myself I see no problem with people sending me email, as after all it's a service running on a public network, if I didn't want random public people to try and use it then I shouldn't be running it should I? Interestingly this ties into another argument that I've had over the years with various government agency types about different computer crime laws that was best summarized by me stating that if the law required you to have prior consent to making any changes to a system, then email would break that law and the smiling government agency person saying "I know, thus I can pull you in any time I want Ben for breaking the law". I finally realized then WHY they left the wording like they had. Still this is just one half of my thoughts on spam, the other half is the side of me thats job it is to stop such things.
When you work in security as long as I have you come to realise that there are very few ways, if not none, to stop someone determined enough doing something in the virtual world. I always put myself in the shoes of the spammers and thought "how would I bypass any anti-spam mechanism?" and in almost every case I could think of a way past it. Thus this article resonated with me quite strongly and made me smile. I'd like to think that there is at least a part of me that doesn't like beating my head against a brick wall.

It's all about HOW you think!

I remember when I first started to play chess seriously I spent many hours reading all kind of books on every aspect of the game. One of the things that struck me when I read it was a study about Grand Masters (people that have achieved a coveted title for their prowess in the professional chess world) and other players. The common thought before this study was that GM's somehow just "saw" a lot further then anyone else did in the same position. That is that there were able to evaluate say 50 positions in a second rather then 3 or 5 that a normal player could. What the study proved through a variety of methods was that in fact that is completely untrue, a GM can see or evaluate slightly more positions then a rank amateur per second, but an identical amount to that of any semi serious club chess player or above. So what was the difference? It turned out it was simply HOW they evaluated the positions. A GM will simply only consider lines (lines is a synonym for "possibilities" in chess lingo) that are strong, whereas a normal club player will often consider moves that are quite simply much weaker. In other words the GM is able to achieve more with an identical amount of processing power because of HOW they think. I never thought of this being relevant in IT until I read this comment.

Porn

I read a very interesting blog recently about the observations of a female clerk in a video store that had a porn section. It was really quite an interesting read on a number of levels, firstly it was an insight into the female perspective of porn, something that I don't often get much of an insight into. The author has quite a humorous style which helps with such a topic, but also some very interesting insights into porn, it's role and it's downsides in society. Unfortunately I can link directly to the section in question, but if you click on this link and scroll to the entry labelled "Men and Women and Porn" you'll see what I consider to be one of the better explanations of porn and it's usage and the differences of perspective between sexes.

On an unrelated note but still in the realm of things you don't talk about in polite company here is a list of swear words as sorted by the British publics impression of how offensive they are and what's more they have the same swear words ranked over time! Check it out here.

a giant leap for mankind

Well I just finished watching 2001: A space odyssey again and as usual it left me thinking. One part of my thought process I'll sit down to write soon, was about the paucity of decent movies coming from Hollywood (everywhere?) in recent times, but the other was about the future and our achievements.

When I look back at the last 100 years or so, I can almost mark every 15 years by something completely revolutionary coming along. Machine guns, Airplanes, Atomic bombs, space flight, television and so on it goes, and then I look at what my generation has contributed and I'm starting to run out of contributions. It seems that what my generation is particularly good at is refining everything else, we take something and we just refine it, so much so that in some fields you could even argue that it is refined so far past it's original inception as to almost be a massive jump, but still, it doesn't feel like it. Maybe it's just my ignorance on matters, but it really does seem that we, as a generation have stopped taking giant leaps, or even looking in many cases. Is it really the case that we have taken all the large steps that can be taken? Is there really no more massive leaps that can be found, are all the advances that are to be made in our society from here on in to be made incrementally? It's feasible I suppose, but it doesn't sound likely to me. So I wonder what am I missing, where have we been making the giant steps? Or have we, as I suspect, not been making any for some time? What causes such a gap in our technological (or otherwise) evolution? When we will once again be driven forwards in all the disciplines of our society by visionaries who look beyond our current limitations. People that aren't afraid to challenge Einstein's theories because they're Einsteins (ok yes it's not that simple, his theories stand because either they are correct, or we simply can't disprove the hypothesis, but I often feel people don't even TRY). I'm looking forward to our next giant leap for mankind.

Privacy and darknets

Today I've spent most of the day researching darknets and the technologies that enable them. Long since gone is the environment in which the original napster was created and now, in these days where the RIAA and it's ilk are constantly suing people the geeks have been brought out in force to combat them. The plethora of available technologies is fairly intimidating, even for a geek like myself it took a number of hours to read up on all the different protocol specs and get to the hard facts about various implementations and the real pro's and con's of each. The question I imagine most of the non geeks ask, is why bother? Bruce Schneier wrote this essay which I think fairly well elucidates why privacy is important to me. I often find myself holding views that are fairly unconventional and in many situations that can actually be a serious hazard to my health, but most importantly it impacts HOW I think. If we are all concerned about how our own thoughts, words or expression could be misused or interpreted then the very fabric of freedom is torn asunder. So I'm going to build myself a darknet, if you're interested you can see my thoughts on what i've read here.

Do you want some more?

A few weeks ago I read this interesting article. What I liked about it was not that it just summed up my feelings about giving aid to the third world, but that it was also from a native and it had a solid logic reasoning. How long do we (I'm using "we" in the first world sense) have to keep giving "aid" to the third world with no difference in the long term outcome before we start to question what we are doing? The charitable side of me would like to think that we keep giving aid in the same way because even though we realize that we are only helping some people directly and in the short term it's better then nothing, isn't it? My cynical side suggests that it's because it's easy to give money and wash our hands of the problem having assuaged our guilt. Of course why we feel guilty about it is a whole different debate ....

Resignation

Well this is a much belated post that I told myself I'd write in the immediate days following my resignation from Betfair while I had nothing to do at work. As it turned out though I was flat chat in the following week and since then have been on "garden leave", that is paid to be at home and consequently not that interested in writing blog entries :)

Betfair was the longest I've ever been in a job and was certainly the job I've enjoyed the most in all my career. I think in retrospect that I was very fortunate to get the manager I did who understood precisely how to manage people like me and by and large just let me get on with things. Of course it was also important that some of the most interesting and talented people I've ever had the pleasure to work with were also at Betfair and it was probably that fact that kept me there so long. That said it is time for a change, Betfair has run out challenges for me and after talking about it for seven odd years I've finally decided to go contracting. Part of the delay on that front is that it was non trivial here in the UK to organize my visa such that I was able to contract, but now I have a HSMP visa which allows me to do that there was nothing stopping me. So after a month or so off, I'll be joining most of the ex pats here in London and joining the contract market.

Farewells always seem slightly odd to me, I've never really understood the need for them that well. I'll keep in touch with the people that I want to and for those that I don't want to well I don't really care what they think anyway so a farewell just seems redundant, if you'll pardon the pun :) When I expressed that opinion though to some of the guys at work I was told that the farewell leaving drinks is actually not for me but for others, apparently they still need an excuse to go out and have a few drinks, so not wanting to be a party pooper I'll organise something shortly and see how that ends up.

A new table!

A few weeks back I got an excited phone call from my land lord (In fact I don't think I've ever had a phone call from him where he wasn't excited, I think it has something to do with being a hair dresser) saying that he had a new table and chairs for me and would I mind if he went into my flat to replace my old ones with the new set. Given that he has been reliable in the past and has done me a couple of favours over the years I said I had no problem with him going into my flat while I wasn't there. He thanked me and said I'd love the new table set and if I didn't he'd remove it and bring back the old set. Win win situation or so you'd think.

As I came home that night I looked into his hair dressing salon (it is underneath my apartment) and he saw me and waved frantically at me. I stopped and went in and proceded to get a garbled story about a mess, tables not fitting and him having to do some work to get the table into the flat, I followed him with a bemused expression as we climbed the stairs together. At the top of the stairs i started to get a picture of what had happened.

For anyone that has ever had to move house or apartment I'm sure you'll be familiar with the situation where you buy some piece of furniture, commonly a lounge, assemble it and then when you go to move out find that you can't fit it out of the room that you assembled it in. This was the reverse problem on a bigger scale. Clearly my land lord had gone out and bought, or more likely via some other means had come into possession of this new table and chair set, decided that he didn't want it and he'd fob it off on me, the problem though was that once he got it to the top of the stairs leading into my apartment he discovered that it didn't quite fit through. Now here is where I, in my naive state, would have thought that he'd have given up, called me to say he'd do it another day, or disassembled the table. Clearly hair dressers think differently to me. He proceded to remove the door and then the door frame leading in to my apartment. Unfortunately after all that effort he discovered he still had that  problem at the top of the next set of stairs, so being undeterred he removed that door and frame as well, and finally lo and behold the door into the kitchen was also problematic, but by this stage he'd gotten door frame removal down to a fine art and in a jiffy he had that obstacle removed.

I now have a really nice new table and chairs, it only took a weekend or two to get my doors back.

Education

An ongoing topic of discussion for me, one which had particular relevance with my ex who was a teacher and whom I got into a lot of debates with on the subject. Having just read this article Lesson number six struck me, as it was a better phrased expression of my own belief. Having gone to a selective high school, I was always a bit biased, but it's still my firm belief that putting children in an environment that looks at talent in a positive manner, rather then trying to chop it down ("tall poppy syndrome") is more important then giving then a fully rounded societal upbringing. Of course there is nothing preventing the two, but it seems to be the case that it's normally one or the other, for example the majority of the schools that get the best academic results in Sydney are single sex schools.

back in the friedrichshain, you don't know how lucky you are babe..

De ja vu, while not German is a fairly good summary of what is going through my head right now. Five years ago I left Australia and went to Berlin to work out what I was going to do with my life after sitting down on my birthday and thinking about what I was doing. I was unhappy with what I'd been doing there and wanted a change. First stop was Berlin and crashing at my friends Benjamin Waters. Fast forward 5 years and here I am, once again at a cross road sitting here in friedrichshain thinking about what I'm going to do with my life couting down the days till my birthday. I wonder what the day will bring this time around, something as radicial as packing up my life and moving to the other side of the world I doubt, but then again, you just never know :)

While Berlin has a lot of issues, it still stands head and shoulders above pretty much every other place I've been in terms of just relaxing and doing nothing in good surroundings. For me what it means is that I'm getting a chance to catch up on sleep and for a change I'm actually reading again. I just picked up Camus's "The Happy Death", which is really starting to freak me out as so far the first few chapters mirror part of the decisions I'm going through right now, work for money or use the money I have to do what I want. In fact the precience of Camus continues to haunt me, in more then just this latest book I feel as though Camus has some kind of insight into my mind, each time I pick up one of his books I learn something about myself, or at least, see that I'm not the only person that thinks like this.

I was going to head off into Poland for a couple of days but the lack of net access at Ben's house put a cramp on my ability to find out the information I needed to plan the trip at short notice. Equally to blame though was the simple fact that I just didn't feel like it and so I'm just using my time to relax and think as well as a touch of reminiscing by walking around the parts of Berlin that I used to live in last time I felt and thought in this way.

I started off the trip by seeing Mahler's 2nd symphony performed by the Berliner Staatsoper conducted by Boulez. Talk about amazing. That piece of music is the most important piece of music I've ever heard (for a variety of reasons that I won't go into here) and to have it performed by an orchestra of that calibre, in Berlin, with Boulez as the conducter and with front row seats was purely awe inspiring. I look forward to the other 3 concerts!

Legalities

If laws are the fabric of our society then surely we have a responsibility for them to accurately reflect what is going on in that society? Clearly changing laws should not be something that happens without serious analysis and consideration of all the implications (or as far as such things can feasibly be taken), but it strikes me that we as a society are starting to fail in this task, as right now after looking at a few different areas it's clear to me that our laws are simply not reflecting what's happening in our society. Let me take a couple of examaples that seem pertinent.
Children. This seems to be one of the big issues right now that was highlighted to me in a recent case where some "child", 17 years old, murdered someone and because they are under the age of 18, that is to say legally not an adult and consequently not responsible for their own actions, they got an extremely mitigated sentence. Now in some cases I can see this as being a good thing, after all we'd like to think that when someone is very young they can reform their ways and be reintegrated back into society, however, my issues comes with a lack of consistency in thought. If the law in the UK says that someone is not an adult until they are 18, why then can they have consensual sex and children of their own while still being considered children, ie at 16? Now I'm not saying that the legal age of sex should be pushed up, actually if anything I'd suggest that people should be considered adults at the age of 16, but the point here is that there is no consistent thought to what the implications of one law to another mean. Of course all this is a little off track to keeping laws up to date with changing things in our society (well perhaps not completely, I'd suggest that the level of extreme crime at young ages is more of a modern thing then in the past, note i say extreme crime, not petty theft etc) so on with the things that seem more relevant to my opening statement.

Genetics. Genetics is one of those things that our legal codes need to start dealing with now. Already it's entirely possible for our society to do some fairly amazing things in regards to eugenics and no one wants to address the questions of what is and isn't legal and more importantly WHY things are and are not legal.  Eugenics is already practised in many places around the world, China being the most obvious example of it being embraced by a society and enforced by laws. It will be very interesting to hear the arguments both for and against the coming of the genetic revolution, Gattica anyone?

Computers. The easiest example for me to pick on due to my job and own experience with the law. Computer crime is obviously something fairly new, after all in the scale of legal codes computers are very new. Really you can say that computer crime laws came into their own category around the late 90's in most countries, and while there have been some updates to most of the original codes they are still hopelessly out of date in a few different ways. One of the fundamental paradoxes of computer crime is that more and more frequently the laws reference access via the Internet. A typical example would be a law that states (and i'm paraphrasing the australian law here as I can't be bothered to look up the precise wording) "it is a crime to intentionally modify, delete or access data on a computer not maintained by you". Of course this means that anyone who sends an email to another person is in breach of said law. When I brought this up with the then Senate rep for this type of thing (can't remember the tittle, it was during one of the more tedious meetings I had with the federal government while doing security work in Canberra) he smiled and said "I know, of course it means we can bring you in on that charge whenever we want". Nice back door for abuse of citizens that you don't like there sir! Computer crime is even trickier though, because people seem to overlook a fundamental thing, that being the Internet is a PUBLIC network. Think about that for a moment, the Internet is a public resource, just like a street. You have every right to walk down the street outside your home, because it's a public resource, just like I have every right, if we were to extrapolate from that law, to walk along the street and look at the houses and see if any had their front door open. Now I wouldn't be allowed by law to enter the house, even if it had it's door open, that would be trepassing, but it would be inconceivable to tell someone that they couldn't look from the street at the door, or even knock on said door. In computer crime terms though many countries have now made it illegal to do a port scan, the virtual equivalent of knocking or looking at someones door. Saying the Internet is a public network has other implications, spam for example. Spam is of course unsolicited, but just like it's not illegal (actually it is in some places in the world, but generally not in most that I'm aware of) to deliver pamphlets to a house, it shouldn't be illegal to deliver emails, after all, if you're on a public network, running a service for the explicit purpose of receiving emails why shouldn't someone send an email to you? Don't get me wrong, I'm not supporting spam, merely pointing out that by our current set of laws it should be legal, again though in many places it's not.

I suspect that the glaring descripencies between many laws are what causes the average layman to believe the legal system is broken, or at the very least not doing it's job as well as we would like. I'm not even going to delve into the world of copyright and patents and where to draw a line on what should and shouldn't be patented / copyrighted and what it means if that can be broken in a trivial manner, in particular if it's demonstrably unenforceable.

The babbling starts!

For some time now I've found myself thinking about something and wanting to write a blog entry. Unfortunately each time I decide that I'll sit down and "write it up" in a sensible manner. Of course, while it's probable that doing this makes the thought a little clearer, it has the unfortunate side effect of meaning that I almost never blog 90% of the thoughts that I have because I never have the time to actually sit down and write it out correctly. In an attempt to see if I can get into the real spirit of "blogging" I've decided to start actually putting down on this blog any miscellaneous thoughts that I think are of interest, either to myself, or some of my readers (it continues to surprise me the amount of people that actually read these ramblings!).

To that end I've created a net category, babblings, which if the nature of my ill considered random dumpings upsets you then simply remove it from what you view. Otherwise I hope you enjoy my new attempt at blogging, and Doug, if you're reading this, I hope that your opinion of my blog doesn't fall too far, I'll try to keep the babblings vaguely interesting ;)

Sickness

I've never understood the majority of peoples actions when they get sick. At work I see the following behaviour all the time. Someone comes in, and they are clearly coming down with a cold, headache, coughing, red eyes and generally not well. Funnily enough they rarely complain, except to reply that yes they're not feeling well, when directly questioned. They'll last that day, even coming in the next on many occasions, and then end up going home sick for a day. The day after they were at home they'll be back at work either still sick, or JUST starting to recover. Usually a day or two after that someone else in close proximity to them gets sick and the cycle repeats itself.

Now I'll freely admit my work ethic isn't as strong as some people's but I just don't undertsand the above scenario. I've been sick about 6 days in 15 years now, so I guess I'm a little biased but I suspect that my actions have a large part of why that number is so low. When I start to feel unwell, it's unusual, and guess what? At that point in time I call in sick, relax, have vitamins, eat well, sleep and generally look after myself. The next day I'm normally fine and I trundle into work. I'd guess that I feel unwell about 4 times a year, which starts to fit into normal metrics on average sickness levels. What I don't understand is why do people let themselves get so sick so as to have to take time off work, often for extended periods of time? Why, when they are sick do they try and "soldier on" ? I work in high powered positions and I've basically NEVER, in my entire career, seen anyone who a company couldn't do without for a couple of days. Why, when they are still sick, do they come in to work and infect other people? What is it about sickness that causes otherwise sensible people to forgo logic and just act like idiots?

Flash mp3 player .. and the winner is!

I've recently started going back to the gym seriously again. It's been really enjoyable but I've found that unlike in the past where I would read a book, this time around the book I'm reading (dante's inferno), isn't really suitable to the gym at all. As a consequence I want to listen to music, but my archos isn't really suitable due to it's size and weight as well as being a HD based music player (in other words susceptible to bumps). So I inadvertantly found myself in the market for a flash player. Now my primarily concern with any music player is quality, especially as I have a good set of earphones. Aside from the quality it needs to be able to support as many codecs as possible and have features that are suitable to my purpose, ie be shock resistant (all flash players are), waterproof, and have possible extra features. After extensive research the winner is a Sony NW-S205FW.

The Sony NW-S205FW is treating me very well so far. It has all the features that I required, as well as having time, pedometer, calories calculator and a few other useful functions and comes standard with a nice arm strap. All in all I'd recommend it to anyone that needs something to listen to music at the gym

America in summary

Well I've been back from my trip to NY for a week or two now but I thought I'd finally write up my last blog on the subject. The trip itself was really enjoyable, though in a different way to a lot of my other ones. This time around I spent most of the time just sleeping and relaxing, I really didn't have any great desire to be doing a lot of the touristy things (having gotten them out of the way in my previous two trips) and consequently spent most of my time worrying about what restaurant I'd go to next. A hard life. I was a little disappointed that I wasn't able to do some of the things I'd planned on doing, namely, Ice skating, helicopter ride and seeing the NY Knicks play, it was a case of the Australians thinking we didn't need to book and once again being drastically wrong, still those disappointments to one side I really had a good trip.

NYE was a low key affair, when people heard I was in NY for NYE they all seemed to assume that I'd be at time square. The reality of "doing" time square for NYE is you queue up starting at about 1900, there is no toilets and you're not allowed to drink and then at 0000 a crystal ball drops .... in light of my description I'm sure you got the impression it wasn't my definition of a great party. Instead John, his girlfriend Karen, his sister Anne and myself all headed out for a nice meal at an Italian restaurant in west village and then on to a pub. Later in the evening we met up with some more friends but the night was all but over by then and we all shortly after 0230 headed home. There was one amusing incident though. Just after we arrived at this new pub and met up with some of Johns friends we were all standing around talking when suddenly there was an overwhelming stench. Clearly someone had farted, but this fart was on an awesome scale. As soon as I started to smell this fart I started to back away from the person I was talking to and trying to move out of the sphere of influence. By the time I'd traveled over 2 meters I begun to appreciate the true horror of what was happening. It was then I cast around and saw one of those massive americans that looked like a crane had just got out of his house that he'd been shut in for a few years was walking past out group. At this point the rest of the group, scattered over about 5 meters, begun to retch and cry out in alarm. John, seeing me standing off to one side looking like I was recovering breath, ran over to me in an attempt to try and outpace the smell. To no avail. He ended up standing next to me, eyes watering and said "you've got to admire the power of that ben, that's seriously impressive". Understatement of the year already I suspect.

From a technology perspective there were a few things that struck me about New York. Now bearing in mind that america was largely the instigator of the current technology revolution in the form of the net, it still surprised me that skype out was free. For those of you who don't understand fully what that means, in simple terms it means that using a small program on your computer, you're able to call ANY number, mobile or landline, in America for free. The implications of this are quite huge when you think about it. A simple example of what this means is that there is a growing number of people who no longer actually have a landline, after all why would you bother when for most of us we only use the landline to dial out on, not receive calls. The other thing that was interesting about New York was that their quality of service from their ISPs was atrocious.

Most people use the net in such a way that they are actually quite unlikely to notice small interuptions, or outages in their access. For example, if you're browsing this website and stopped to read this blog entry, then chances are that you're not going to notice if your ISP has a blip for a few seconds and stops passing all traffic. Even applications that you think might notice it, say Instant Messaging clients, can tolerate very small outages, in the area of a few seconds. What this all means is that if you're an ISP you can afford to, in the sense of not upsetting many customers, have a number of small outages and this is precisely what happens in New York. In London things are very different, the ISPs here have to deal with, I can only assume, a lot more net savvy crowd of people, people I work with do not tolerate their ISPs to go down at ALL, because in many cases the way they are using the net is subtly different. For example playing an online game will give you huge visibility of any kind of network slowdown, let alone outage. So without giving more examples you can imagine my surprise when pretty much every ISP I was connected to, regardless of size or reputation, constantly had outages, in the vicinity quite often of one every 60-90 minutes.

After two trips to NY in two months I can say that I really do like that part of the world. The american culture is very different, John summed it up best I think when he said that "Americans are participators" and he was dead right, it pervades their society at every level, from the "buy in" you get with team building excercises at work which most Europeans / Australians would be to cynical to participate in, through to their desire to be in the spot light answering a football quiz at an ice hockey game, the effect is obvious, and while it's not something that I like, it does make for a very interesting spectacle. Aside from that though there is a lot to be said about a good standard of living, with an emphasis on service and doing it right and efficiently and making sure that everyone is happy. I strongly suspect that I'd probably struggle to work there, I'm just too lazy to get into this one week off a year (the average amoungst my profession working in NYC) but still, I'd like to go up to Boston and see if that is similar as I could easily see myself living and working there at some point in my life.

Sweet tastes

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 ;)