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?
Friday, February 2, 2007
Friday, January 26, 2007
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
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
Sunday, January 14, 2007
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.
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.
Thursday, December 28, 2006
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 ;)
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 ;)
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.
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