Michael Jennings

Parking meters in Old Pasadena

2012-02-09T08:40:00.005-05:00

This article on how the history of parking policy has influenced the built environment in Los Angeles is fascinating. Intriguingly, it tells the story of the parking meters in Old Pasadena, with which I had a run in in 2007. Apparently I was caught by famous parking meters that have much aided city cohesion and promoted urban charm. Certainly I was completely unaware that Old Pasadena had been a rough neighbourhood only a few years previously. When I visited, I thought it was very nice.

It is interesting, though, that a lengthy, in depth article on the subject chooses to use as a particular example something that I encountered in person, and which affected me enough to make me blog about it at the time.

Of course, what annoyed me in 2007 was not that I had to pay for parking - I put money in the meter - but the incredible efficiency of the enforcement. I received a parking ticket even though I returned to my car no more than two minutes after the meter expired. If I was a resident of Pasadena and visited regularly and was aware of hyper-efficient parking enforcement, I would not doubt have got back to my car two minutes earlier, or put slightly more money in the meter to start with. This one happens when one travels. You don't always understand local norms, and you can sometimes get in trouble due to it.

They are still doing it after all this time.

2012-02-03T05:39:00.000-05:00

An old complaint, but I live in the UK and most of my family live in Australia. In such circumstances, the DVD is the perfect gift for birthdays and Christmases and such. It is inexpensive, lightweight and easily mailed, and provides you with an opportunity to give a thoughtful gift if you understand the tastes of the recipient.

That the movie industry (with its stupid region coding) actually tried (and tries, to some extent) to stop me from doing this, just boggles the mind. Seriously, this is an industry that is too dumb to live. (I make no comment on the morality of anything, merely on their dumbness).

Illusions.

2012-01-30T03:42:00.002-05:00

Last week, I was in a car, being driven south along the Israeli coast, from the Lebanese border in the direction of Acre. We were of course driving south, but my mind kept telling me we were driving north.

The reason for this is because the coast I have done the most driving on is the east coast of Australia, and when you are driving with that coast on your right, you are going north.

However, there is more to it than that. The water looked similar to what you find off Australia. I am used to the Mediterranean having tiny little waves, if any, but there are some quite decent waves hitting the Levant in winter. There appears to be a bit of an Israeli surf culture, to. (Wherever there is a surf culture, there will be Australians around, too. One of the charms of the slightly storied but twee French resort of Biarritz is to turn a corner and find an Australian surf shop / cafe that could just about be in my home town of Wollongong). There are rock platforms in the water of the Levant, too, some of which have rock swimming pools cut out of them in a way that is also common in Australia. And there are eucalyptus trees - native to Australia - on the shore. (Oddly enough, possibly the first time I ever heard of the state of Israel as a child was when I was told that native Australian eucalyptus trees had been introduced to the relatively barren land of Israel, where they had grown well in a similarly harsh climate to that of Australia).

So it felt like the Australian east coast. However, that still wasn't it. I have driven along other coasts in the past without the unutterable sense that I was driving in the opposite direction from the one I was. After a moment, though, I figured it out. The issue was the sun, which was over the sea in a south-westerly direction from me. In the northern hemisphere, the sun is in the south, and in the southern hemisphere the sun is in the north. So the sun in the afternoon driving south in Israel was at a very similar angle to the sun in the morning driving north in Australia. And a check just now tells me that Sydney is at a latitude of 34 degrees south, whereas Haifa is at 33 degrees north. So exactly the same angle. Interesting.

More travel

2011-12-29T10:21:00.002-05:00

My 2011 travel photoessay is here. The previous five are here, here, here, here, and here.

The rules for how many photos I post are here. The stretches this year are that Ceuta is part of Spain (although disputed by Morocco), Gagauzia is part of Moldova (although a special autonomous region that declared independence at the end of the Soviet Union, but eventually came to an agreement with the Moldovans due to not having the support of the Russian army in the way of the Transnistrians, and Sabah and Sarawak are part of Malaysia, although having considerably more autonomy, and their own immigration rules, due to having been historically somewhat reluctant to join Malaysia upon the formation of the country. (Sabah's autonomy has been weakened to the point where it was touch and go really here, but it still definitely remains in the case of Sarawak).

Of course, I also saw lots of graffiti in Bucharest this year claiming that Bessarabia (ie most of Moldova) was part of Romania, and relations between the two sights are rather fraught, so one wonders where the borders in this part of the world will be in a couple of decades. On the other hand, one of the most telling things I saw all year was the lighting on the respective sides of the river Prut separating Romania from Moldova. Both sides of the river are populated, but the Moldovan side got dark at night, while the Romanian side was lit up like any populated area of at least moderate wealth. That evening was one of the hairiest evenings I have ever had on my travels, to tell the truth. At some point I might tell the story.

Linguistic observations

2011-10-16T10:31:00.004-04:00

When I started using the internet and related networks (long time ago now - late 1980s) it was pretty much an entirely English language thing. The critical mass was pretty much not there for much to happen in foreign language forums. What did happen was in Usenet, and although much smaller clusters of non-English Usenet groups did exist in certain places (German, for instance), even if I had wanted to use them they were not generally brought into Australia anyway.

Things moved on, and when the web and blog became dominant, the non-English net did become a bigger deal, but it was isolated. Multilingual people who did want to be heard in the English word would generally blog in English. A few people would maintain multiple versions of their blogs in different languages, and blogosphere in other languages became very extensive, but a blog tends to be in a single language.

What I am finding interesting in the world of Facebook and Twitter, though, is that these are somehow much more multilingual media. People who speak more than one language seem to be happy to update social media in a mixture of languages, and which they use depends on context. Many conversations are in a mixture of languages, too. I know lots of multilingual people, because that is the sort of life I live, and my Facebook and Twitter updates now contain streams of Swedish, Albanian, and Spanish, amongst other things. From time to time I find myself using Google's translation tools to figure out what is being said. The etiquette is different, too. If you a comment in Spanish on an English language blog, people will tell you to stop it. In a conversation on Facebook, though, the onus is much more on you as a reader to figure out what it means.

I will be interested in seeing whether the social networking companies respond to this. If I set my reading language to English, will they offer me some automated system where they look at my feed, observe the languages of comments and attempt to translate them for me, possibly alongside the original. Will we eventually reach a moment where machine translation is so good that the language variations in such a feed will go away again. Not for a while, I think.

For the moment, though, I find that as an English speaker I am peering into a world that exists for a great many people but not for me. Multiple languages are one of the regular facts of life. Conversations can be in multiple languages, and can change almost from sentence to sentence. However, for much of the English speaking world, things are not like that.

I have that mental block that tells me that learning a second language is so hard as to be almost impossible. This is probably silly, as much of the world has managed it. In contrast, I would see learning, say, calculus, as very easy. On the other hand, most of the people of the world have not managed to do this.

Update: To that, I would add that I follow far more of the western European languages than I do the Russian or the Hebrew, both of which also appear in my streams in reasonable amounts. I can read Cyrillic when I have to, but it is work. I have no idea whatsoever how to read Hebrew. Both, I know, can be translated using Google language tools. However, both seem foreign enough that I generally will not do so. I can understand enough Spanish or Swedish to be tantalised, so I then do take this to the next step.

Rugby World Cup 2011

2011-10-07T09:08:00.002-04:00

On Wednesday I recorded a podcast with Brian Micklethwait, Patrick Crozier, and Antoine Clarke, in which we discussed the 2011 Rugby World Cup, which is about to reach the quarter final stage.

More travel related mental skills.

2011-10-05T08:34:00.002-04:00

Over the summer, I have been to Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova, Ukraine, Poland, Slovakia, the Czech Republic, Macedonia, Albania, and Kosovo. With the exception of Slovakia and Kosovo (which use the euro, each of these countries has its own currency. Also, with the exception of Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech republic, each of these countries maintains its own immigration controls. Travel is thus like it was in western Europe 20 years ago. There is lots of messing around with passports, money changers, and pockets full of strange coins. Like western Europe 20 years ago, it is all done in the context of a peaceful and relatively civilised environment, but there things are hassles.

However, when I am in a country, I am extremely adept at keeping track of exchange rates. When I am quoted a price in local currency I know exactly what that is in Sterling. I am very careful, and I don't let anyone play any tricks on me, as people in touristy places will try to do. (In non-touristy places, generally they won't. One of the interesting facts about travel is that you are generally safer - at least from petty crime - in places where tourists do not go, as the pickpockets and bag-snatchers that prey on tourists do not exist in such places.

However, when I leave a country and its associated currency, I forget the exchange rate pretty much instantly. There is usually no value remembering it, as even if I do visit the country again, the exchange rate will be different. The exception is if I come back to the same country a week later, as one might if doing a circular trip. In fact, this happened to me in Macedonia last month. I flew in and out of Skopje, but I spent most of the trip in Albania and Kosovo. When I got back to Macedonia, I couldn't remember the exchange rate, and had to look it up again.

Mental games

2011-09-29T17:04:00.003-04:00

When I travel, I am usually very good at separating the "getting there" and "getting home" parts of a trip from the trip itself. At the end of a trip, I am very experienced at figuring out precisely when I must stop sightseeing, having lunch, talking to friends or whatever it is I am doing and must head for the airport. There is a precise moment when I change into going home mode. After this, my focus is entirely on the journey. Before that, my focus is not on the journey at all, other than knowing that there is a moment coming when things will change. As another way of putting it, I do not allow myself to become stressed by the journey until I need to.

Except, last Monday I didn't manage this. I spend Sunday night in a hotel in Prizren in Kosovo. My flight was from Skopje airport in Macedonia. The journey from Prizren to Skopje takes three hours by bus - probably two to two and a half hours by private car. I was taking the bus.

There are two direct buses a day from Prizren to Skopje. These go at 5.30am and 9am. For some reason there are none after this. I got the 9am bus. The journey was uneventful, other than that I spent three hours on a bus. I was thus in Skopje at midday. I didn't need to head to the airport until maybe 4.30pm or 5.00pm. There were one or two things in Skopje that I could have gone to see, but I had been to the city twice before and had seen most of the sights already, so things were not *that* pressing. I was hungry, so I sat down in a cafe beside the river, and had a steak and a beer, and read my book for a bit. I had been traveling for a little over a week, so I was a bit tired, but I discovered that I did not want to get up and sightsee. Apparently I had been mentally in "going home" mode since boarding the bus in Prizren at 9am. So I had another beer and kept reading my book, but I didn't feel completely relaxed. Apart from a brief detour to a supermarket, I kept reading until about 4.30pm, at which time I headed to the airport. No real hassle, but upon reaching the airport I discovered that my plane was 75 minutes late.

Actually, by the time the plane left it was around two hours late, and rather than getting to Luton airport at 9pm, we arrived at 11pm. There were still trains running to London, but by that time they were stopping at all stations rather than running as expresses. And due to the Thameslink ~~2000~~ Programme works, they were stopping at St Pancras rather than running through to London Bridge. So, I had to get a night bus from King's Cross to South London. No problem, but more hassle and slower than just getting the train. I was in bed by 1am - not bad given the arrival at Luton at 11pm, but still a slower and more stressful journey than if I had arrived at 9pm. And I was exhausted, since I had been traveling since 9am.

The funny thing is this. If there had been a bus from Prizren to Skopje at 2pm, I would have managed to stay in holiday mode rather than travel mode until about 1.30pm. I would have been mentally far fresher when I got home, as the total journey time would have been shorter. The fact that I spent four hours and some in the middle of the journey simply sitting down and eating, drinking and reading didn't help. This was travel time.

Although there are only two buses a day from Prizren to Skopje, there are many buses throughout the day from Prizren to Pristina, and quite a few from Pristina to Skopje. I probably could have left Prizren at 12 if I didn't mind changing buses in Pristina. The total time on buses would have been longer, and there would have been more opportunity for something to go wrong, so I was right to get the direct bus at 9am. However, if I had done this and nothing had gone wrong, I almost certainly would have felt less exhausted when I finally got home, despite the greater complexity of the journey.

The mind can play funny tricks.

On Budweiser

2011-09-10T15:18:00.004-04:00

While discussing Czech beer in the last post, I mentioned that Budvar beer is widely available in Slovakia, but did not touch upon probably the most interesting trademark dispute I know of, which is over the use of the world "Budweiser" to describe beer.

There are of course two Czech cities that have given their names to extremely well known beers. One is the city of Plzeň (Pilsen in German), which has given its name to Pilsener. This is a fairly straightforward instance of a place name that has become a generic name. The word pilsener today does not mean "Beer from Pilsen", but is simply used as the name for a particular style of beer. The EU in recent years has tried hard (often excessively, in my opinion) to reclaim European place names on the way to becoming generics names using laws about Protected Designation of Origin, but "pilsener" is too far gone for this. The word does not imply any particular beer, or any particular origin for the beer. Ask for a Pilsener in the Czech Republic or Slovakia and you will get a beer from Plzeň, but this will not likely happen anywhere else. Breweries in Plzeň do not have exclusive use of the word, but nobody is going to stop them using it, either.

The other city known for its beer is Budějovice (Budweis in German). The story here is more complex. A Brewery named Bürgerliches Brauhaus Budweis was founded by ethnic Germans in 1795, and was describing its beer as Budweiser ("Beer from Budweis", in German) since at least as early as 1805. This beer was later exported to the United States and was clearly being copied when Anheuser-Busch started brewing their "Budweiser" in the US in 1876.

A second brewery, now named Budvar, was founded in Budějovice in 1895. This company also called its beer "Budweiser" when it exported it, probably due to the face that this word was already famous. In Czech, it would have been described as "Budějovický", and this name was used domestically.

The three companies fairly early on got into arguments over the name, and in 1911 they came to an agreement that Anheuser-Busch would have the rights to the name in North America, and the two Czech brewers would have the rights in Europe.

However, in 1945, the Czech lands came under communist rule, ethnic Germans were expelled, both breweries were nationalised, and German names were seen as undesirable. Bürgerliches Brauhaus Budweis, the more German of the two breweries, was renamed "První budějovický pivovar Samson", and stopped using the "Budweiser" name. I think that Budvar continued using it, particularly for exports to Germany, but I am not 100% certain of this.

In any event, after the Cold War ended, Budvar started exporting again in a big way, and this coincided with Anheuser-Busch expanding too. The two breweries have been fighting each other over the trademark ever since. Beer lovers often express sympathy for Budvar in this dispute, on the basis that the trademark surely means "Beer from Budweis", and also Budvar makes better beer. I am personally not so sure about this, as Anheuser-Busch actually does have a prior claim to the name than that of Budvar, and their size is probably more responsible for the fame of the name than anything else. In addition, although Budweiser does mean "Beer from Budweis", Budweis is no longer the name of the town, which is Budějovice. The truth, though, is that we have a very unusual case in which two companies have very long standing, legitimate claims to the same trademark.

Courts in Europe have tended to favour Budvar's claim to the trademark, and courts in the US have tended to favour Anheuser-Busch. This is probably fair, given the 1911 agreement. In Britain, the courts have ruled that both companies may use the name, and that consumers are smart enough to tell the difference, which is a refreshingly grown-up verdict. In countries where Budvar does not have the rights to the name, they tend to call it Budějovický Budvar, which means the same thing in Czech. (In North America it is sold as "Czechvar", as even this is apparently too much for Anheuser-Busch), In countries where Anheuser-Busch does not have the rights to the name, they brand their Budweiser simply as "Bud".

But what about the Czech brewery that does have a prior claim to the name to that of Anheuser-Busch, the brewery originally known as Bürgerliches Brauhaus Budweis, which changed its name again after communism to "Budějovický měšťanský pivovar ", an exact translation of its original German name? Well, after communism, this company also sought to re-establish its traditional trademarks, and also started using "Budweiser" in the names of many of its beers. However, it only did this in markets where it had an unambiguous right to do so, and has largely stayed clear of mighty trademark disputes with Anheuser-Busch. The brewery still exports, though, under all kinds of names. ("Samson", "Crystal". "Boheme"). So funnily enough, the brewer which probably does have the strongest historical claim to the name is the least inclined to actually use it.

As is happens, my local Tesco stocks their beer, in this instance branded as "Boheme 1795". The fine print on the back of the bottle does mention that the beer was brewed in Budějovice, but the bottle also has "Pilsen" in much larger letters on the front. The beer may be approximately a pilsener in style, but I can't imagine this thrills the people in Budějovice that much. "Pilsen" is a word that anyone is free to use, however.

And yeah, it is good beer. Quite similar to Budvar, actually.

On beer

2011-09-09T08:36:00.002-04:00

I am just back from an eastern European trip. In 19 days I visited Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova (including Turkic speaking Gagauzia and the largely Russian speaking city of Balti), western Ukraine, southern Poland, and then the Slovak and Czech republics. I consumed a reasonable amount of beer on this trip, because the weather was very hot and the beer was very cheap. (The price bottomed at about 30p for a half litre in the Ukraine). I always drink local beer when travelling, both to see what it is like and because it is usually much cheaper. (A basic beer from one place becomes a premium beer when sold in another country). The beer was all good. Mostly I was drinking national brands in Bulgaria and Romania. In Moldova, I was drinking Moldovan national brands in Romanian speaking parts, and Ukrainian national brands in the Gagauzia and the Russian speaking parts. In Chernovitsi in the Ukraine there were lots of interesting and local beers (including some excellent wheat beers) as well as the fairly bland Ukrainian national brands. It would seem that even after Stalin committed genocide and then relocated vast amounts of population, the beer making skills taught by the Austrians have survived.

In southern Poland, mostly Tyskie and Zywiec. National brands, but some regional variation. (Both those beers are Silesian. The third big national brand in Poland is Lech, which comes from Poznan, and you see it less in the south). Although this area of Poland was ruled at times by the Austrians and the Prussians, the Germanic style beers have not survived there to the extent that has happened in the western Ukraine.

None of this was bad beer - particularly not those lovely local Ukrainian beers - but a lot of it was large brewery lager. I was struck by how much better the beer was when I crossed the border into Slovakia and then into the Czech republic. Velvet divorce or not. the Czech beers are still much consumed in Slovakia. The two "national" beers one sees a lot are Pilsener Urquell and Budvar. There are always local Slovakian beers available too, usually somewhat cheaper than the Czech stuff. When I crossed the border into the Czech republic, there actually seemed to be an even greater focus on local beers, and less Pilsener and Budvar. Things were much more like what one sees in southern Germany. There will be a local brewer, who makes a number of different styles of beer (but all local brewers make the same styles). And in the territory of that brewer, that is what you will get.

Of course, the third Czech beer that one sees a lot outside the former Czechoslovakia is Staropramen. This was nowhere to be seen. This is perhaps like the way Australians don't drink Fosters or Danes don't drink Carlsberg. Ask a Czech for his opinion of Staropramen and he will tell you it tastes like cat's piss. I think this is a little hard on it, actually.

Customer service

2011-08-16T13:56:00.004-04:00

I have a 2007 model 15 inch Macbook Pro. This has served me extremely well, and it withstood rough treatment: it has been carried round South America (and other places) in a backpack; it was dropped once during an airport security screen, and a child once pushed it off a coffee table in a hotel on the Costa Brava, amongst other, lesser things. Its hard drive had to be replaced after the Costa Brava incident, but apart from that it has kept working just fine. So really tough, rugged construction.

However, in recent times it has not always been terribly willing to wake from sleep mode, and yesterday I found that it would not boot at all. When I pressed the power button, the hard drive and fans would spin and the power light would come on, but that was as far as it would go. No classic Mac startup sound, and nothing on the screen.

If the computer was beyond simple repair, well, it didn't owe me anything. I don't really want to spend the money on a new laptop now, but on the other hand, those new 13 inch Macbook Airs look awfully nice. But there was no harm in taking the laptop into the Apple Store to ask someone to look at it.

So, I did this. The guy at the genius bar commented that my laptop looked particularly "well used". (The words I would use are "beaten up"). He attached a diagnostic tool to my USB ports, and looked at his screen intently as he typed things into his computer. After doing this for a couple of minutes, he observed that this was one of the more interesting cases he has seen in a while, and told me that there were known faults with this model and that as a consequence the logic board would have to be replaced. As this was a known fault and Apple's suppliers had provided sometimes faulty parts for this model, there would be no charge to me for the repair. I was asked to sign a form, which amongst other things stated that there was a £600 charge for this repair which in my case would be waived.

There are known issues with the graphics card on my particular model, but these are not the precise symptoms I was seeing.

Still, though. They are doing a major repair on a seriously beaten up three and a half year old laptop that never had Applecare and they are not charging me for it? I once had an IBM Thinkpad that failed three months out of warranty and that was that, even though I later discovered that it was common for that particular model to fail in that particular way. I have to say that Apple are being particularly awesome, here. Not only are they doing an expensive repair, but if they had shaken their heads and simply said that they could do nothing, I would not have been upset and I would have probably gone downstairs to look at new models, so they also possibly cost themselves an immediate sale. I am rather awed.

Unnecessary Complexity.

2011-08-16T09:29:00.003-04:00

Cory Doctorow of Boingboing (amongst other things) was naturalised as a British Citizen a few days ago. On Twittter, he expressed curiosity as to why on his citizenship certificate had the words "BRITISH CITIZEN" typed in, rather than bring one of the things printed on the blank certificate What else could it be?

Various people pointed out there there are various kinds of British nationality. I went through this process myself a few years ago, and I was curious and investigated the matter (too) thoroughly. The story is this. Every time I explain how one particular class of British nationality came into being, I will capitalise its name.

Prior to 1949, there was a single status of "British Subject" held by everywhere in the British Empire over which Britain was sovereign. There was also a status of "British Protected Person", for people in places with a British mandate over which Britain was not formally sovereign.

From 1949, independent Dominions and Colonies becoming independent created their own national citizenship statuses, and a new status of "Citizen of the UK and Colonies" (CUKC) was created for those who remained. The expression "British Subject" was retained as a carry-all for all citizens of Commonwealth countries, but it was the actual national citizenship that mattered. Generally, when a colony became independent, citizens of the new country did not retain CUKC status, although, there were a few situations in which some of them did. People in that country who were British subjects but did not gain citizenship of the new country generally did retain CUKC status. There were a few cases in which everyone in the independent country lost their British citizenship but not everyone received citizenship of the new country. Such people were British Subjects but not CUKCs. Finally, there was one case (Ireland) in which people who had lost British citizenship were invited to apply for British Subject status if they wanted to retain it.

When British Protectorates became independent, citizens of the new independent countries generally became citizens of the new countries, although there were a small number of people who for various reasons did not. These people remained BRITISH PROTECTED PERSONS, and still do.

In 1981, the Thatcher government decided to reform all this, and a various new classes of citizenship were created. The big change were that people CUKC status were split into three groups.

- People associated with the United Kingdom (including the Channel Island and the Isle of Man) became BRITISH CITIZENs.
- People associated with a still extant British colony became British Dependent Territory citizens (later renamed BRITISH OVERSEAS TERRITORIES CITIZENS). (BOTC)
- People associated with neither of these things (i.e. people who had gained citizenship and had for some reason also retained British citizenship became BRITISH OVERSEAS CITIZENS).

British Subject status was renamed "Commonwealth Citizenship" for everyone who was a citizen of a Commonwealth country, which left only those who had been British Subjects but not citizens of any commonwealth country (mostly in the Indian Subcontinent and Ireland) holding that status.

Only British Citizens and British Subjects associated with Ireland had the automatic right to live in the UK. It was (and is) possible to have BOTC status and British Citizen status simultaneously. BOTCs connected with Gibraltar have always had the right to obtain full British Citizenship by application in addition to BOTC status. (After the Falklands War, Falkland Islanders were given full British Citizenship in 1983, but I shall get to this in a moment).

Of course, at that time, the vast bulk of people who became BDTCs (later BOTCs) were in Hong Kong, and cynically, the purpose of the whole exercise was to deny Hong Kong Chinese the right to come to Britain prior to or after the handover of Hong Kong to Chine in 1997. I can't imagine why you would actually want to deny prosperous people from one of the world's most entrepreneurial places the right to come to the UK, but Margaret Thatcher did. As a slight sop to the Hong Kong Chinese. yet another type of British Citizenship was created in 1985. BDTCs in Hong Kong were allowed to register to become BRITISH NATIONAL (OVERSEAS) after they lost their BDTC status in 1997.

Once the job of screwing the Hong Kong Chinese was complete, the British discovered that they had no great objection to the small number of people in Britain's few remaining colonies from living in Britain, so in 2002, everyone with BOTC (unless it was associated with the British Sovereign bases in Cyprus) was given full British Citizenship, and people born to British citizens or anyone else permanently resident in any remaining colony was from that date a British Citizen by birth. This essentially duplicated a law that had been passed for the Falkland Islands only in 1983.

Essentially, almost everyone in the few remaining British Colonies (except for those bases in Cyprus) now has both full British Citizenship and BOTC status. Apart from the Cyprus thing: BOTC status has only one use. Although the British government has granted British Citizenship to virtually all remaining colonials, it has not delegated the power to naturalise people as British Citizens to colonial authorities. It has delegated the power to naturalise people as BOTCs. Once someone has been naturalised as a BOTC, they can then apply to Britain for registration as a British Citizen. This is normally granted, but the Home Office has a theoretical right of veto. (Gibraltarians have access to a route to British citizenship for which there is not right of veto given the the British government under the 1981 act, but nobody else does.

So, what does that leave us with:

British Citizenship is the normal kind of citizenship.
British Overseas Territories Citizenship is citizenship of Britain's remaining colonies, and is usually held concurrently with normal British Citizenship.
British Overseas Citizenship is for people who slipped through loopholes in the process intending to deny them citizenship during decolonisation, and were disenfranchised later.
British Protected Persons are people who slipped through loopholes in the process intending to deny them citizenship during decolonisation, but came from protectorates rather than colonies.
British Subject Status is for people who lost British Citizenship during the independence of India without gaining Indian or Pakistani Citizenship, or is for Irish people who wanted to remain British.
British Nationality (Overseas) is for the Hong Kong Chinese.

All of these except for the first two are residual categories of citizenship that it is not possible for new people to obtain, except perhaps in the case of a child born of parents with one of these statuses who does not obtain any other nationality at birth. It is only possible to be naturalised as a British Citizen or a British Overseas Territories Citizen, and these are the only things that could have been typed on Cory Doctorow's certificate. As people being naturalised as British Overseas Territories Citizens are normally naturalised in the Overseas Territories, there is some doubt as to why there is a need to leave a space for "British Citizen" to be typed on the form. It would presumably create less work by simply having a different certificates for those very rare to nonexistent occasions when BOTCs are naturalised in the UK.

One further question is which, if any, of the other types of citizenship are of any use to people holding them. Only British Citizenship automatically gives the right to reside anywhere. British Subject status gives you the right to live in the UK if that status is associated with Ireland, but BOTC status does not by itself give you the right to live anywhere: residency status of the particular overseas territory (colony) is normally granted separately. The British government will grant you a passport if you hold any of these statuses, but if the passport states that you have a citizenship status that does not give you the right to live anywhere or conversely anywhere that will take you if you are deported, other countries are likely to make the visa requirements onerous, and they do. The exception to this are British National (Overseas) passports, which are fairly easy to travel on as they indicate that you come from and (almost always) have the right to live in Hong Kong, which is a prosperous place.

And of course, the final thing is how does this all relate to the European Union. Well, under EU law, the following people are British Citizens for the purposes of also being EU citizens: British Citizens, excluding those associated only with the Channel Islands or the Isle of Man; British Subjects associated with Ireland, and BOTCs associated with Gibraltar. Falkland Islanders and Bermudans are automatically EU citizens, but Manxmen aren't, unless they have an association with the United Kingdom. To gain such an association they either have to have parents or grandparents who were born there or have such an association, or they have to have lived there for a time, which they easily can do as they have full British Citizenship rights in Britain. Just not in the rest of the EU.

And I am rambling.

In which Michael possibly reveals himself to be a travel snob

2011-08-10T09:04:00.010-04:00

A couple of days after the riots broke out in London over the weekend, Prime Minister David Cameron rushed back from his holiday in Tuscany to deal with the situation, or something.

Seirously, what is it with West London British luvvydom (something Cameron can't help but seem to want to belong to) and Tuscany and Provence. Yes, beautiful places. Yes, good food. Yes, good wine. Lots of interesting ruins and old buildings. Worth visiting once or twice. But, frankly, dull. Do they all go there together in summer every year?

Couldn't they just, sometimes, go somewhere a little more interesting. I am not expecting our ruling class to holiday in Gagauzia, but perhaps once in a while they could go as far as the other side of the Adriatic? Croatia is nice. Equally good food, although perhaps slightly iffier wine. Possibly even more beautiful scenery. Equally wonderful ruins. Not even dramatically less Italian. Cheaper. (Okay, Peter Mandelson has been hanging out with dubious Russians in Montenegro, but I am not sure if he counts).

I am perhaps going off at a tangent, but David Cameron in Tuscany has started me thinking of the movie Love Actually, written and directed by super-Luvvie Richard Curtis, back in the days before we started comparing him un-ironically to the Khmer Rouge.

In this film, a writer played by Colin Firth takes what is all considered a remarkably long time to fall in love with his Portuguese housekeeper Aurélia, played by Lúcia Moniz. After she has returned to her family, he realises that he loves her and so rushes after her to declare himself. We see him arriving at Marseille airport and rushing to the restaurant run by her family, where he manages to successfully propose to her in broken Portuguese.

With all respect though, huh? Marseille airport? He pursues a Portuguese woman back to her family in Provence? Okay, there probably are Portuguese families running restaurants in France, but Provence? Why not chase her back to Lisbon? Or Porto? Beautiful, cinematic cities both of them, either of which would look really nice in a couple of establishing shots. (In fact, I first visited Lisbon after seeing it so beautifully shot in Fred Schepisi's movie of John Le Carre's novel The Russia House in order to see if it was actually that beautiful a city). Or perhaps she went to Lagos to cook bacon and eggs for English package tourists? Or she went to Pinhão to tread grapes with her bare feet? Or at least something and somewhere that might indicate that Richard Curtis realises that Portuguese people come from Portugal, and that the world outside London and the Home Counties does consist of slightly more than just Provence and Tuscany?

(In retrospect, I now think that the movie would have have been improved by Lúcia Moniz pulling out a button, pronouncing that she was putting nenhuma pressão on Colin Firth over the pegada de carbon of his flight to Provence and then causing him to explode into pink mulsh, but I suppose that was too much to hope for).

At this point I am getting a further sense of missing John Major. He at least knew where Portugal is.

Silliness

2011-08-05T19:31:00.006-04:00

Pilllip II of Macedon National Stadium, Skopje, Macedonia.

The aforementioned Phillip was the first of only two national managers who led successful European campaigns.

(Skopje is in a bowl in the mountains and is a smoggy city. Getting clear photographs is sometimes difficult).

Etiquette for the modern world

2011-07-27T10:41:00.004-04:00

I was having lunch in a nice London restaurant with a female, foreign friend of mine. She wanted to tweet, SMS, update her various friends and social networks to tell them where she was. However, she was doing this using highly expensive roaming on her Swedish smartphone.

On the other side of the table, I was using my local, inexpensive data allowance on my smartphone. Seeing what she was doing, I quickly turned on the portable WiFi hotspot on my own smartphone, so that she could share my local data allowance and did not suffer the expensive data roaming charges that she was incurring.

Was I honour-bound as a gentleman to do this? Or should I instead spend my time mounting a campaign against the horrific roaming charges imposed by phone companies?

Update: As a further issue to ponder with respect to this trivial and largely absurd question, what should one do when one party, er, leaves the table for a few minutes? Portable WiFi hotspots have very short range, so if a gentleman leaves the table (particularly if his destination is in the basement) should he in fact leave his smartphone on the table so that the lady can continue to use his WiFi, but in doing so also slightly increase the risk that the phone will be stolen by the urchins of the East End? The fact that such a moment is likely to be the occasion when she is most likely to want to use it is pertinent, surely.

Patterns persist.

2011-07-21T10:29:00.004-04:00

If you map Mobile phone conversations of today, you get The Nine Nations of North American as envisaged by Joel Garreau in 1981.

Smart guy, Garreau. His other book Edge City probably helped me understand the modern built world more than any other book I have ever read.

Chinese telephone companies.

2011-07-13T10:52:00.002-04:00

I left a comment over that The Register that got a little out of control. If anyone wants to hire a telco analyst, I am available.

In the mid 1990s, there were two 2G GSM mobile networks set up in China, one by the incumbent operator China Telecom, and one by a new company China Unicom. (We say "new company", but all these things were and generally still are state owned).
In 1999, the mobile assets of China Telecom were split off to found China Mobile. The advantages of being part of the incumbent fixed line operator up to that point were such that China Mobile was by far the market leader by then, a position it retains to this day. (China Mobile is by far the biggest mobile operator in the world). At the same time, more assets of China Telecom were spun off as China Netcom to build high speed internet infrastructure in China - i.e. to be a large ISP.
On order to supposedly compete with fixed line services, China Unicom was also given a Wireless Local Loop (WLL) licence. For this, it used the IS-95 CDMA technology developed by Qualcomm in the US, which was being sold as a WLL solution at that time as well as being a fully featured cellular system (as used by Verizon and Sprint in the US). China Unicom were highly aware of this, and thus used the WLL licence to build a second mobile network.

Meanwhile, the Chinese had decided that they did not want to pay huge levels of royalties to western companies to operate 3G mobile phone services, and decided that they would develop an "indigenous" 3G standard called TS-SCDMA to be used in China. (In actual fact, this was originally developed by Siemens to be possibly used as the European 3G standard, but this lost out to W-CDMA). While this was being further developed and made ready for use in China, no 3G licences were issued for use in China.
Thus, approaching the 2008 Olympics, there were no 3G services in China, and the Chinese were concerned that China Mobile was too dominant, and they were concerned that their "indigenous" 3G solution had not been launched yet, and they were embarrassed by the prospect of foreigners coming to the games and discovering that there was no 3G service, and they retrospectively decided that what was better was to have a number of telcos competing on both wireless and fixed line services rather than separating by function.

Thus the industry was reorganised:

China Mobile was awarded a TD-SCDMA licence, and ordered to roll it out at once.

China Unicom was given a W-CDMA licence compatible with the rest of the world, and was forced to buy China Netcom so as to offer fixed line and wired ISP services. China Unicom was forced to sell its IS-95/CDMA network to China Telecom.

China Telecom was instructed to buy China Unicom's said IS-95/CDMA network, and upgrade it to 3G speeds. (China Unicom had already done this to some extent).

Thus we have three mobile networks, the biggest of which has 2G GSM and a strange, 3G network using a standard used nowhere else that few people use and which doesn't work very well, but which has most of the customers. (There is no number portability in China, so customers don't often switch network). The second largest, China Unicom, has the combination of GSM and UMTS/W-CDMA that most iPhones are designed for, and that is why they have been the only network offering the iPhone until now. (Apparently several million people use unlocked iPhones on China Mobile's 2G GSM network in EDGE mode only).
And you have a third mobile network, which uses CDMA/IS-95 as used by Verizon in the US. Apple's introduction of a phone for Verizon earlier this year didn't quite solve the problem, though, as the use of a SIM is optional on CDMA, and China Mobile uses a SIM and Verizon doesn't, and the CDMA iPhone 4 does not accept one. Hence we have had to wait a little while for that problem to be ironed out. My assumption is that the new iPhone(s) that we will see later this year will solve that problem.
China Mobile is going to use 3GPP LTE for 4G phones, as apparently are everyone else in China. At that point all three carriers in China will probably carry the iPhone, but we won't see that until late next year at the earliest.

Etymological puzzles.

2011-07-11T09:09:00.002-04:00

When staying in hotels in Asia, it is quite common to find that the hotel will offer a "baby sister service". This is exactly the same as a baby sitter, of course, and the expression makes sense because in places where people have large extended families, it is a task that is often by performed by a sister. "Baby sitter" doesn't appear to make much sense if you are a non-native English speaker, so the phrase has been transformed into another similar sounding phrase that we would see as incorrect, but which makes more sense in the context.

Similarly, perhaps, in Malaysia and Indonesia one will often stay in an institution called a "rest house". This is a place of accommodation that lacks the full facilities of a hotel, basically. The name makes perfect logical sense - this is after all a house in which you rest. I do wonder, though, whether the word actually comes from people with limited English mishearing the word "guesthouse", and thus converting it into something slightly different.

Photo composition moments

2011-05-09T06:47:00.007-04:00

I was looking for a nice contrast of things, and I thought that the bullring in the foreground, an in some ways fairly typical spanish city in the middle, and a long line of cranes indicating that this is indeed one of Europe's most important ports in the background was nice.

Algeciras, like Felixstowe, is one of those ports that is not historically very important but is a very major point now due to its strategic location. The really large ships on the route through the Mediterranean and Suez Canal to Asia are not going to divert to Valencia or Barcelona, so they stop at the very bottom of Spain. Containers can then be transferred to smaller ships to head north or elsewhere, or onto trucks or trains to be taken to other points in Spain. (When container shipping arrived in UK, another reason why much of the shipping moved from London to Felixstowe was that the Port of London was very heavily unionised and Felixtowe wasn't. I am not sure if a similar factor came into play in Spain, given that the alternative of Cadiz is also famous for its labour disputes and militant union men. in any event, Algeciras is now the key port.

With respect to the photo, having taken it I then realised that I also had the Rock of Gibraltar behind the port, and it is always delightful to get more in the photo that you intended.

Of course, "hub" seaports (in which containers are unloaded from one ship to another, or possibly other modes of transport) are like hub airports. Location is important in the sense that they need to be very conveniently on the route from A to B, but local markets are possibly less important than the strategic location and efficiency of a port. The busiest container port in the world is in Singapore, which is a significant but not very large market in a perfect location at the end of the Straits of Malacca. (The two Chinese ports of Hong Kong and Shenzhen - essentially two parts of the same urban area with a border down the middle - are each individually close to Singapore in terms of size, however. Combined they are massively busier).

Algeciras on the Straits of Gibraltar is a perfect place for such a port, but so is Tangier in Morocco. (The Indonesian island of Batam is as good a place as Singapore, too, but building a major port in Indonesia is just too hard). And as it happens, there is an enormous project to build a gigantic port in Africa, directly opposite Algeciras, the so called Tanger-Med, port, actually about 40km east of Tangier. I visited it the day before I visited Algeciras.

Well, when I say visited, I mean "went past it in a bus", actually, so my photographs are perhaps a little lacking because of this. However:

It's actually a lot bigger than that - I was only able to get a certain amount into the photo. In fact, when complete, it will be much bigger than the port at Alegiras on the Spanish side.

There is a lot more under construction, too. Plus there is an extensive motorway system heading south. When the port is complete, it will be the largest and hopefully busiest in Africa. To some extent it is to compete with Algeciras - in terms of transferring containers from one ship to another, Tanger-Med will be more modern and will have lower cost and (hopefully) more flexible labour. As well as that, the port is about trade between Africa and Spain, Europe, and further afield, and this is all good too.

Spanish registered truck, there.

One hopes that this is actually a sensible project, and that it will aid African development and international trade in a significant way. This of course requires efficient management, relatively free markets, the rule or law, and reasonably low levels of corruption. The port is apparently being built with government money, and run by "a private company with public sector privileges". That sounds like an invitation for trouble, but is probably no worse than the arrangements by which many ports are run. One does also wonder from who the Moroccan government has borrowed the money. There is a reservoir of cheap capital that is used to fund Arab infrastructure (and other) projects that is ultimately based on the huge oil wealth of the Emirate of Abu Dhabi. Like all mispriced capital, such money can be useful if you are trying to borrow money to finance and build a sensible business, but the mispricing also tends to encourage bubbles, rentseeking, excess, and an ultimate collapse under a mountain of debt. Given the strategic location of Tanger-Med, a sizeable port is sensible, but one hopes that massive overbuilding has not occurred. The story of EU aid for infrastructure projects in Spain and Portugal was starting off with sensible projects, and ending up with absurdity, and one hopes that this is not similar.

Impressing the Swiss

2011-04-28T04:58:00.006-04:00

Last week, I spent some time waiting for a bus at this road intersection in Croatia. The direct bus from Bihać in Bosnia goes to Zagreb, but as I was going to Zadar, I had to get off at the intersection and wait for the bus to Zadar.

As I was waiting, I found a mobile phone in the gravel beside the road. It was switched on. The menus were in German, and the phone (and SIM) were branded with the Orange network. I threw it in my bag, and thought little more of it for the moment.

However, when I got back to London, I realised that I still had it. I couldn't switch it on again, because the SIM in the card was PIN protected. However, when I put my own SIM in the phone, it worked fine. The phone was not network locked. After a little navigation through the menus, I managed to switch the phone to English language mode. There were a few SMS messages stored in the phone (in German, and apparently describing a trip to Bosnia) and of course there were phone numbers stored in the address book. However, these were all in national format, without a country code. Numbers that were clearly people's mobiles were of the form 07xxxxxxxx. A number entitled "pizza" was of the form 08xxxxxxxx. A business number, presumably.

Now, whose phone was it? Orange do not have a network in Croatia or Bosnia, and the phone was set to German. So the phone belonged to another foreign visitor. Orange do not have a network in Germany either, but they do have a network in Austria. Many, many Austrians visit Croatia - they used to rule it - so my first guess was that the phone belonged to an Austrian. However, a quick check of the Austrian telephone numbering system indicated that Austrian mobile numbers have the form 06xx, and 07xx and 08xx are all kinds of extraneous services rather than regular numbers. So, German speaking but not Austrian or German. Who then?

Further checks indicate that Orange does own a network in Switzerland, 07xx does denote mobile numbers in Switzerland, and 08xx is used for free and shared cost services often used by businesses. So, Swiss.

At this point I am on a roll, and national stereotypes come into it. I would expect a Swiss person to try to return my phone to me, so I am going to make an extra effort in return. (I might not do this for certain other nationalities. On the other hand, strangers have on occasion gone to some trouble to return lost phones to me, so in any event one wants to return the favour, as it were). There is also a sense that if I do get in contact with a Swiss person, that the contact will then be uncomplicated and hassle free, due to their being Swiss. I don't have the name or number of the owner of the phone, so I look through the names in the address book. One of them is listed as "Mama", which sounds promising. Mama's date of birth is listed in the phone as some time in 1970, so Mama presumably is okay with being sent text messages. (She also has children old enough to lose phones while travelling in the Balkans, despite being younger than me. Perhaps I need to get a move on with certain aspects of my life. But I digress).

I look up the country code for Switzerland, which is 41. I change the (national) number for Mama into an international number, and send two text messages (in English) to the number, stating that I found a phone belonging to one of her children in Croatia, and that if provided with an address, I will return the phone.

The next morning I receive a phone call from Switzerland. A young man speaking excellent but (slightly) accented English tells me that I have his girlfriend's phone, and is slightly amused when he discovers it is in London. ("Ah. 44 is England"). He gives me an address in the Swiss town of Chur, capital of the canton of Graubünden, near the Austrian border and just south of Liechtenstein. I haven't been to Chur, but I have been quite close nearby. Interestingly enough, Graubünden is the only canton of Switzerland where the Romansh language is spoken. I doubt Samsung make phones with Romansh menu options (although Linux probably has Romansh options). However, as the town's name was spelled "Khur" by the man on the phone, and that is the Swiss German spelling, I guess the phone did in fact belong to a German speaker.

I actually verified the address with Google Maps before sending the phone, and as Google gave the name of the town as "Chur" (the standard German spelling), that is what I used. I suspect it will get there.

Unfortunately, I missed something, of no relevance to the problem of returning the phone, but still irritating. The Swiss telephone numbering system mixes geographic and non-geographic numbers in an ugly way, and as it happens 08x, is used for freephones, shared cost numbers, and the town of Chur, for which the code is 081. As it happened, the pizza shop actually had a local number, so I should have been able to figure out that the phone came from Chur. However, I wasn't looking carefully enough, all I really wanted to know was the country, and I was not expecting the number system to be that inelegant.

Attentive readers will also probably suggest that it would have been simpler to simply read the SIM number off the SIM, obtain the mobile country code from the SIM number, and find out that it was Swiss that way. This is true, but the SIM number is in tiny writing, and my eyesight is not as good as it used to be.

A general frustration

2011-04-08T19:46:00.001-04:00

When I posted this piece on Samizdata about getting held up in airport security and missing a flight yesterday, my thought was that I was perhaps being a little self-indulgent and I would be taken to task by someone in the comments for this.

Nothing like that though. Just sympathy, and many, many more insults for airport security policies.

Feel the me

2011-03-16T07:03:00.004-04:00

Sadly, I am definitely one of these.

Me in Turkey last week: 15 inch laptop, iPad, Kindle, Android phone, dumb phone, digital SLR, two additional lenses, external card reader and spare memory cards, one headset.

Constitutions

2011-02-21T11:39:00.001-05:00

My kind of engineering

2010-12-23T15:16:00.003-05:00

Vientiane, Laos. October 2010

Cricket posting

2010-12-09T17:47:00.004-05:00

English person: "Yeaaahhhhh. It's amazing. Our cricket team has thrashed yours. I bet you are really appalled and upset this morning. Your team is crapppp!!!!!

Australian person: Yes. I've known this for months if not years. While we would love to win the Ashes back, I am not dramatically more upset than I was yesterday. The decline of my cricket team is a more a long running, endless agony of the soul than anything sudden.

English person: Surely this must come as a surprise to you. It does to me.

Australian person: No. Also, Ricky Ponting is an idiot who should have been sacked in 2005. I've known this since 2005. Really astute people have known it longer. Now please go away.

The UEA is an even scarier place than I thought

2010-11-06T07:59:00.001-04:00

Dubai. January 2010

Abu Dhabi, October 2010

Really, should American fast food chains even be allowed to operate in places like this?

KEEP PLANET GREEN

2010-11-01T16:20:00.006-04:00

My inkjet printer had run out of ink. A seller on ebay offered me "compatible" cartridges for about half what Canon were charging, so I ordered a set. They took a couple of days to arrive, the seller gave me positive feedback on ebay before I received them, and my printer is working perfectly with the new ink cartridges. All good.

However, as well as the full cartridges, the seller sent me a return envelope with a prepaid postage label with an address in Coventry, and the words "KEEP PLANET GREEN. Recycle empty cartridges" on it. It was pretty obvious what was going on. The seller wanted me to send him my empty cartridges so that he could fill them with ink and then sell them to somebody else.

This is fine, of course. In fact, this is good. If someone is making a living doing this, well done and good luck to him. (The absence of an article between "KEEP" and "PLANET" makes me think he is Slavic, and probably Polish. Once again, good). Interesting, though, that he thinks that the best way to encourage his customers to send him their empty cartridges is through Green guilt-trippery. He might be right. Personally I would prefer he simply stated "Please give me your empty cartridges so that I can refill them and sell them to somebody else" or (best of all) "Please return your empty cartridges and I will give you £1 off your next order".

That said, I put my empty cartridges in the envelope and popped them in a postbox. He gave me good customer service and is most welcome to them.

2010-10-05T22:59:00.001-04:00

Update: If anyone has been wondering, this is the Kurilpa Bridge in Brisbane, Australia. I suffered laptop death recently, and somehow as a consequence, the spiel which was intended to go with this picture never got posted.

Is it just me, or is this a weirdly modest claim?

2010-09-16T18:21:00.004-04:00

Ways of looking at things

2010-08-26T11:16:00.003-04:00

I had a bad accident last year. I was wearing shoes with soles with poor traction. I slipped when going down some stairs. I put a hand out to stop the fall and did this. I had pretty much everything on that list except for re-fracture, compression neuropathy and tendon rupture. I was in a lot of pain for about nine months, but this is now mostly gone. I have regained the ability to do everything I normally do on a day to day basis (touch type, for instance), but I have some problems doing anything that involves strength in my left hand.

In any event, I was having lunch with a friend yesterday. I explained the above.

"Can't you get it fixed?"
"Not at the moment, no".
"What do you mean?"
"Not at the present level of technology".

He looked at me for a moment, and the I guess he acknowledged that this was reasonable. It is absolutely the right way of looking at things though. In things such as artificial body parts (an artificial joint and perhaps artificial tendons to go with it) and surgical techniques, the rate of advance is sufficiently fast that one must consider it with respect to your own health.

Some additions

2010-08-25T18:24:00.006-04:00

In February, the great thing of Singapore still had cranes on it.

It is much taller than it appears from these photographs, by the way. I am a long way away from it in all three cases.

God bless globalisation

2010-07-30T08:47:00.002-04:00

I am an Australian who is regularly resident in London. I am sitting in an Irish pub in Bucharest, drinking Danish branded beer (probably brewed locally) and watching a rugby match between Tonga and Fiji on the television.

Seriously, we need to get Romania into the six (seven) nations as soon as possible.

A bit of a racket.

2010-07-04T13:33:00.005-04:00

My electrical supplier is Scottish and Southern Energy. (This company came to be after a merger between Scottish Hydro Electric and Southern Electric. Operations appear to have been fully merged, but both brands are still used, presumably due to petty intra-Britain nationalism, so you get your bill from Scottish Hydro if you live in Scotland and Southern Electric if you are in England). I pay by direct debit. I had set up a direct debit to pay £40 a month when I moved into the flat, and up until now that seems to have covered my electrical usage.

Yesterday, however, I received my latest electricity bill. It stated that my account was £110 in debit, and that therefore my payments were to be increased from £40 to £58 a month in future to make up for this. I was puzzled by this, as my previous bill had shown the account at approximately zero and I had spent a significant time out of the UK during that period with all my electrical devices turned off. It was thus barely credible that I was using 70% more electricity than last year. Therefore, I examined the bill more carefully.

The bill was not based on a recent meter reading, but instead was based on an "estimate". I went and read the meter myself, and actual usage was a good deal less than the estimate. As far as I can tell, lacking an actual reading Scottish and Southern simply made something up on the assumption that I was using more electricity than I had done previously. Having done that, they used this entirely made up number to justify increasing my monthly payments.

I called the customer service number on my bill, and I was interrupted perhaps a quarter of the way into describing the situation, and the nice Scottish lady on the other end of the phone asked me to simply tell her the correct reading and she would fix it, which she did. My direct debit payments were switched back to £40 a month. I was slightly concerned, however, by the extent to which she seemed to understand the problem before I even explained it to her. It's almost as if it happens a lot.

I would be intrigued to know what would have happened had I not done this. When the meter was read, would my payments be reduced to move that (now massively in credit) account back towards zero, or would the credit balance be allowed to continue increasing as the debits continued to exceed the actual cost of usage? If so, this is a nice little way for the company to get its customers to fund its working capital requirement for it.

Unimportant observation of the day

2010-05-29T08:39:00.006-04:00

Once upon a time, a young Scottish lady with who I was a little enamored (okay, a lot enamored - sad story) told me about how as a child she had doubted the existence of dolphins. These were apparently creatures from imaginary stories, like the tooth fairy. This was not a childhood belief I was able to share, because I lived near the Australian coast, and schools of dolphins swimming past were something I commonly saw. Once in a while I would see whales, too.

What makes me remember this now is that I was having a conversation with someone recently and the subject of penguins came up somewhere. (Perhaps we were talking about Linux). The person observed that penguins were exotic and strange creatures to him, and I observed that "Surely you must see them off (and on) the coast of Scotland sometimes". This observation was seen as somewhere between odd and hilarious.

Thanks to Wikipedia, I have since discovered that penguins for some reason only live in the southern hemisphere. For me, penguins are like dolphins. They were quite common where I grew up. In the evenings as I child I would see and hear them running along the beach in the distance. Once, we had one in our bathtub for a few days, as it had managed to get caught in a fishing net that had been washed up on the beach, and my father had rescued it in the hope that it would get better and he could let it go. (If I recall quickly, it was loud and vicious). Until now, I had made the assumption that penguins were pretty common on a much larger portion of the coastlines of the world than is in fact the case. I am usually pretty intolerant of people who assume that the whole world works in exactly the same way as the small bit of it they are familiar with, but in this instance I was guilty myself.

Irritations

2010-05-26T17:39:00.002-04:00

Yesterday, my mobile phone rang. I answered the call. There was a pause, Clearly some computer somewhere was waiting for me to pick up before connecting me to someone in a call centre.

"Good afternoon. Am I speaking to Dr Jennings?"
"Yes".
"I am calling from that manages your mobile phone contract with O2"

For odd regulatory reasons, when mobile phones were introduced in the UK, the mobile networks - Vodafone and BT Cellnet (now O2) - were not permitted to sell their own services at retail. Instead, other companies were required to do the actual selling of mobile phone contracts, and were required to manage the customer relationships and provide the after sales service. Later entrants - Orange, Mercury One2One (now T-Mobile) and Three - were never subject to this requirement, and the requirement was dropped for the original two operators in the mid 1990s when the third and fourth operators entered the market. However, some of the odd characteristics of the British mobile market that exist to this day are a consequence of this original policy. The independent mobile phone retail business remains unusually large in this country, and although Vodafone long ago bought out all other organisations managing its customer base, O2 did not completely do so. Thus my customer service relationship with O2 is indirect and via another company.

"Dr Jennings, we have noticed that you are near the end of your contract, and we have analysed your usage patterns and we think we may have different tariffs that might be cheaper for you than the one you are on. So I would like to tell you about those and if you like we could also upgrade you to a new phone"

Basically, they wanted me to sign up for another lengthy contract. They may or may not have actually looked at my usage patterns. The deal they gave me last time was actually so good that I doubt they were going to offer me anything better, but I am usually at least interested to see what companies will offer me.

"Dr Jennings, before I can proceed further I need to check your identity. Can you please tell me your date of birth and mother's maiden name".

I pause for a moment

"Your security system is not acceptable. You cannot simply cold call me and then ask me to give you personal information"
"I have this information in front of me already. I just need to confirm your identity".
"If I were to call you, I would know who you were and that I could likely trust you, because I would have looked up your number somewhere reliable. Therefore it would be reasonable for you to ask me for personal information. When you have called me, the situation is reversed, and it is not reasonable, because I do not know your identity".

Clearly this is not in his script

"This is standard procedure"
"Then it is a very bad procedure. I actually believe you are who you say you are, but having such a procedure in place encourages bad practices. In fact, it is so incompetent that I am tempted to cancel my phone right now. Good bye".

At that point I hung up the phone. I immediately wished I hadn't been so hard on the guy, as he was just working from a script, and the incompetence of his employer wasn't his fault.

This is absolutely terrible practice however. One should never give personal information to someone from who one has received a cold call and whose identity one cannot confirm. Legitimate companies encouraging or requiring customers to do this makes customers used to doing it, and makes it easier for the genuinely dishonest to commit crimes. The fact that large companies with who you trust your personal information are not able to understand that the situation is different when they call you from the situation when you call them is really quite troubling, too.

2010-05-17T15:29:00.007-04:00

On April 21 this year, I was in Odessa, on the Ukrainian Black Sea coast. I was booked on a scheduled Ryanair flight from Katowice in Poland the following evening at 8.25pm. For the few days before this, I had been in the Western and Southern Ukraine. In that time, most European flights, including all in and out of the United Kingdom and in and out of Poland had been canceled, due to the ash cloud from the eruption of the Eyjafjöll volcano in Iceland, and I had spent those days wondering exactly how and when I was going to be able to return to London. As April 21 went on, I kept checking the internet. As the day went on, it became clear that Ryanair was definitely going to resume flights the next day. I needed therefore to head for Poland. As it happens, Katowice is a long way from Odessa. I had allowed myself to roam as far as I had because I had not expected flights to resume any time soon, and there were interesting things further east to see.

Still, though, at 6pm on April 21, I was not too worried. I had 27 hours to get from Odessa to Katowice airport. In a way, I was slightly disappointed, because Crimea and Moldova were both within reach, both
were intriguing destinations, and I had no particularly pressing business in London before May 2. However, I had a confirmed seat on the flight on the 22nd, and I was unsure what the consequences would be if I missed it. Thus I did not want to miss it.

There was an overnight train to Lviv leaving at 7pm. I purchased a second class ("kupe") sleeper ticket for this train. I would figure out the rest of the journey when I reached Lviv.

As it happened, there is no need for suspense. I did ultimately make the flight home. At midnight (London time) on April 22nd, I was in my own bed in my flat in London. The story of what happened in between is, however, a peculiar one, involving well traveled Russians, less well traveled Russians, alcohol, cannabis, smoked fish (none of these mine), jitneys, agriculture with animal pulled ploughs, external borders of the Schengen area, snow, cigarette smuggling (some of this mine), helpful Polish bus drivers, poor Polish trains and good Polish motorways, and a very expensive, frantic and fast last minute taxi ride, in which the success or failure of a 27 hour journey all came down to five minutes. This post is the story of that journey. However, before anything else I need to explain the circumstances that led me to be in Odessa on that Wednesday afternoon in the first place. Let me digress for a few paragraphs.

I visited Eastern Ukraine, specifically Kiev, last year. In Kiev, I received lots of advice that I should also visit Lviv, on the basis that it is a beautiful city. Mixed in with this was the suggestion that Lviv was somehow more "authentically Ukrainian" than Kiev, Kiev being more Russian (or perhaps Russia being more Kievan). Certainly parts of Kiev last year did have some of the nouveau riche flashiness of over-blinged people going into nightclubs and badly built modern apartment blocks that were constructed in a recent construction boom that had just horribly flamed out that I at least associate with recent years in Moscow and St Petersburg. And Kiev is full of the architecture a westerner imagines when he hears the word "Russian".

That was one factor. Another was that until recently I had not visited the Balkans and South-Eastern Europe much. However, a trip to Bulgaria (mixed with the important "Where can I get a cheap flight to this week?" ie luck factor) a couple of years ago led to another trip to Bulgaria, a couple of trips to Romania, and a couple of trips to Croatia. Suddenly I found myself visiting the remains of the Austrian Empire, and of course the region where empires (Austrian, Ottoman, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian) for a long time collided. In six months I visited Wrocław (not Austrian since 1740s, but you can feel the Austria in the cafes), Sibiu and Cluj-Napoca, and then the Austrians' favourite Adriatic seaside resort of Opatija, now in Croatia but once again you can still feel the Austria. All these places are in different countries, but you can feel the common history in the architecture, the food, the coffee, and the beer. Lviv (then Lemberg) was once a great city of that Austrian empire. This was a central city of that great cultural and intellectual explosion that followed Jewish emancipation in the 19th century, and then of course later this was pretty close to the centre of the unspeakable mass murder of the Holocaust. Just why the supposedly civilized heart of Europe felt the need to tear itself apart in such an unspeakable way, I don't really know. And just how the birthplace of Ludwig von Mises managed to be ruled by the Soviet Union for 50 years is another of those great mysteries and ironies of Europe and the twentieth century.

So, that made two reasons to go to Lviv. When I have two different reasons to go to a place, it goes to the top of my destination list. As it happens, there are no direct flights from London to Lviv. One can get there on discount airlines if one is willing to change in Dortmund, or in Timişoara, or in Kiev, but the change leads to expense and hassle. Alternately, Lviv is not far from the modern day Polish border. One can fly to Poland and get the train. Flying to Poland is easy.

The nearest Polish city with an airport is Rzeszów. I was able to get a cheap ticket to Rzeszów on April 13, but tickets back were more expensive. I was not in any particular hurry to get back, and I discovered that Ryanair would give me a ticket back from Katowice on April 22 that was very cheap. Katowice was further into Poland, but I had a couple of things in that part of Poland that I wanted to do. The Czartoryski Museum in Krakow was closed when I attempted to visit it last year, and it would be nice to stop in and see its great collection. Plus, I wanted to make a second visit to Katyn memorial in Katowice, that I previously visited in 2007. Since then I have learned more Polish history, which would perhaps make my reaction different than then. Secondly, although the bulk of what was lost in my sad hard drive failure have been recovered from various backups, those from that trip are some of the sad lost photographs, and I wanted to retake some of them. So, although traveling to Katowice involved further travel, there were enough reasons to do this travel that I did not mind too much.

However, events overtook me. Polish president Lech Kaczyński and his large entourage including most of the General Staff of the Polish armed forces, the central bank governor, and many other senior Polish officials died in a plane crash near Katyn two days before I was due to arrive in Poland. I spent a day in Rzeszów. The people of Poland were clearly enormously upset by what had happened, but life went on. Since 1989 Polish policy has been aggressively pro-Western, and Poland is now a modern, sensible, stable country. I bought a charger for my laptop in a large Tesco store. Not far from this were outlets of the two French hypermarket chains Carrefour and Leclerc, along with other stores. Lines of succession to the Polish presidency, central bank governorship and military command were all clear, and everything worked well. Poland is modern, stable, and relatively prosperous, and the country was having nothing remotely resembling a crisis.

However, the country was in national mourning. It felt almost like intruding on someone else's grief. I headed for the Ukraine. I had a number of good days in Lviv. The city looks like a central European city rather than a Russian city, although it is alas now one of the poorest of all central European cities. The Austrian influence is once again strong. The beer is superb, but the wine terrible. Lviv is a city of churches. Christians there have many choices, with there being about six major forms of Christianity to choose from, three in communion with Rome and three not. Lviv was once also no doubt a city of synagogues, but (alas) we know what happened there. I enjoyed the visit, but this is not what I am presently trying to write about.

I had been a few days in Lviv. European airspace was closed, President Kaczyński's funeral was going to be in Krakow and half the leaders of the world might or might not be attending. In any event, Googling I should have done before booking my flight indicated that the Czartoryski Museum was still closed. It appeared it might be weeks before I could get home. So, I changed my mind about where I was headed, and went further east. A Czech had recommended I visit Odessa while I was in Chernobyl last year, plus I am a cinema buff, and for a cinema buff there are famous things to see in Odessa.

I was hoping there would be pram rental somewhere nearby

That wasn't in the movie.

Plus the city had by repute wonderful Art Nouveau architecture. Plus I had never seen the Black Sea before. If I was genuinely stranded for some time, I could perhaps see Crimea, and the Black Sea coast of Romania. And the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria. And even if I was delayed a few days, I could stop in Moldova as I headed back to Poland. I try to visit one at least profoundly weird place each year, and Transnistria would be a good one for this year.

However, none of this eventuated. Flights resumed just in time for my scheduled trip home. On April 21 I found myself needing to be in Katowice in 27 hours. Thus I boarded the train to Lviv.

There are three classes of ticket for overnight trains in the former USSR. The cheapest, 3rd class, is called platzkart. Platzkart carriages contain 54 beds. There is very little privacy, inadequate toilent facilities, and travelling platzkart has a certain reputation. ("The basic layout is essentially a copy of the old slave ships, or perhaps the GULAG camps"). However, travelling this way is very cheap. 2nd class is kupe. Carriages contain 9 compartments, each containing four beds, with an upper and lower bunk on either side of the compartment. There is more privacy, and more comfort and space. Tickets cost about twice the cost of platzkart - for a journey from Odessa to Lviv my kupe ticket cost the equivalent of about £10. 1st class is spalny wagon, which consists of compartments containing two beds each. This costs three or four times as much as kupe - not hugely expensive by western European standards, but a considerable premium. So, I choose kupe. I bought a ticket to Lviv. Even this is not always easy when timetable information in the station is entirely in Cyrillic, you have no common languages with the railway staff, and the very badly paid staff themselves received their customer service training in the Soviet Union. But I managed it.

Of course, in a kupe carriage, you share a compartment with three other people, and it is luck as to who you get. I prepared myself for the journey. The custom on long Eastern European train journeys is for passengers in the same train compartment to have something resembling a picnic in the compartment. People pack food - often things like cheese, bread, and cold meats - and these things are shared at meal times. I went to a shop near the main train station and purchased some bread, cold sausage, cheese, and tinned fish, and was prepared for a little socialising if the people sharing the compartment were friendly. I also made sure I had a charged laptop with a spare battery, the previous evening's episode of Lost on the hard disk, an assortment of movies, and a couple of good books.

So I was ready. I boarded the train and was guided to my compartment. There were three other people with me: a respectable looking married couple about my own age, and a younger man. I sat down. The younger man insisted on speaking to me and the other passengers incessantly in Russian. There was a lot of beer, vodka, and a few inscrutable food items on the table. His breath smelled of something including but not limited to beer. He insisted on talking incessantly for the half hour or so I sat there with the two other. The married couple sat there largely in silence with rather stern expressions on their faces, although the husband greeted me in accented but quite decent English.

After about a half hour of this, the married couple got up departed the compartment. The younger drunk Russian stayed for a bit longer, and attempted to get me to share his beer. After a while I perhaps foolishly took a swig. A few minutes after this, he attempted to get me to share the marijuana he had stashed in his sock. He wasn't just drunk. I declined on the marijuana. After a time he also got up and left the compartment. (Yes, he was probably Ukrainian rather than Russian, but as a state of mind, one enters Russia when one gets on a train anywhere in Russia, Ukraine, or Belarus. One just does).

Not long after this, the husband (but not the wife) of the other couple returned. As it happened he spoke very decent English: accented when he spoke but his comprehension was excellent; the sort of English that someone has when he has spent time working in places and environments where it is useful to be able to speak English and where it has been picked up along the way. He asked me where I was from. When I told him I was Australian he commented that my English was easy to understand. Many Australians speak heavily accented and idiomatic English, but I didn't. I spoke heavily accented and idiomatic English for a couple of sentences, and we both laughed. He told me about his travels in the Middle East and Asia. We compared notes on Dubai and Malaysia. He seemed a nice bloke - exactly the sort of company one hopes for in a train in a foreign country.

However, this was not to last. His wife soon returned and they had a discussion in Russian. I was told that they were going to a compartment in another carriage, as "he" would undoubtedly return soon, and they needed to get some rest. I was not unsympathetic to their point of view, but I was not pleased by this development. Given the choice of sharing a compartment with two sensible people and a drunk and stoned Russian nutter, or with just a drunk and stoned Russian nutter, I knew which I preferred. This clearly showed on my face. My English speaking friend translated one last phrase from his wife, directed at me. "Good Luck".

Of course, I was not expecting good luck, and I did not get it. My drunk and stoned friend returned a while later. By this time I had settled down on my top bunk with a book, but he still wanted my attention. More incessant speaking. Attempts to slap my hand with his hand. Attempts to shove beer and vodka in my direction, followed by more incessant talking and unpredictable reactions when I refused. After about half an hour of this, he departed again, thankfully.

In order to comprehend the full experience of the rest of this journey, more of the customs of Russian train travel need to be revealed. Firstly, each carriage has a provodnitsa (provodnik if male, but they usually seem to be female) who is an attendant who checks tickets, provides bed linen, cleans compartments, offers coffee at the start and end of the journey, and is generally in charge of the carriage. Secondly, overnight trains make long stops. At a major station the train may stop for up to an hour in the middle of the night. When this happens, vendors selling food, drink, and other items appear on the platforms of the station, and passengers often get off to buy items from them.

Consequently, my journey developed a rhythm. My obnoxious friend would come into the carriage and irritate me for half an hour or more, before getting restless. At that point, he would vanish to somewhere else on the train for a time. If there was a stop, he would clearly leave the train. Shortly afterwards, he would reappear in the compartment with various items, and would talk incessantly in Russian and would thrust whatever he had bought in my face, and perhaps attempt to high-five me again.

What can I say? Having two smoked fish and a bottle of Ukrainian beer thrust in your face at midnight when you are trying to sleep is one of those things that is perhaps better to write about later than to experience at the time, although admittedly it does make for a good story later.

The next phase in the rhythm would be that the items that had been purchased on the platform at the stop would be placed on the table in the compartment, and my obnoxious friend would again get restless and wander to somewhere else in the train. At that point the provodnitsa (who was aware she had a problematic passenger) would come into the department and take away all the beer, vodka, illicit drugs, smoked fish etc that were on the table. There was no direct confrontation - just a sort of attempt to moderate the problem. In one of these intervals I got my laptop out, and managed to watch Lost. I pulled the memory card out of my camera, and was just starting to sort out my holiday snaps when my friend returned, so I put the laptop away as I did not know how he would respond. Similarly, I was reluctant to get out my own food, as I did not know whether he would demand some as part of Russian train etiquette, or any of a number of other weird reactions.

At about 1am, the provodnitsa came in, made my obnoxious friend's bed, and then clearly went somewhere else and encouraged him to come back to the compartment. She then spoke to him for what seemed like about an hour in the sort of way a particularly patient mother would speak to a particularly troublesome small boy. I could only think, what a horrible job. If you behaved like this on a train in western Europe, you would be thrown off the train at the next station, and likely be greeted by police who would take you off and throw you in a cell. However, in the Ukraine, the only power apparently available to the provodnitsa is to attempt to pacify the passenger. She has apparent authority, but is backed up by very little power or actual authority.

In any event it didn't really work, for after she left, so did my obnoxious friend, and his cycle of going, coming back and being annoying continued. I was concerned that at some point he would vomit and/or urinate, but thankfully this did not happen, a small mercy I suppose.

At about 3am, after yet one more such incident, I finally lost my temper. After another attempt to gain my attention, slap hands with me, and share beer with me from my friend, I got up and swore at him, loudly and in English. I cursed him. I cursed his mother. I cursed his country. I expressed the view that the Mongol sacking of Kiev in 1240 had been not nearly comprehensive enough for my liking. I managed to use pretty much every obscenity in the English language that is not a racial epithet. I responded to being slapped by slapping back. He made a gesture suggesting I join him in the corridor outside, but nothing came of that.

And oddly enough, soon after that he did finally go to bed again and fall asleep. I got a little sleep myself, too, but it was only a few hours to our arrival in Lviv at 7am. The provodnitsa woke us at that point. My obnoxious friend at this point insisted on buying me a cup of coffee, and shaking my hand as he left the carriage.

However, when I left the carriage, I was shattered. I had hoped for a restful night, and I hadn't got one. I walked off the train, and it was very cold. I sort of struggled to the nicest lounge in the railway station - the one with the admission charge and Wifi. I sat down and had a coffee. After a while I got out my laptop and attempted to check train times. After a bit of struggling with websites, I discovered that there were two trains a day from Lviv to Przemyśl on the other side of the Polish border, one at 23.59 and the other at 7.18. It was about 8.00am. I could have made the 7.18 after arriving in Lviv, but I had been too shattered to think about it at the time.

Actually, it was worse than that. Some of the carriages on that 7.18 had actually come from Odessa, on another train that had departed there at 6.13pm the previous evening. I could actually have gone to Przemyśl directly from Odessa. But, as I said, figuring out the timetables in Cyrillic had not been easy.

On the other hand, two trains a day. That Silesian corridor between Lviv and Wrocław was once one of the centres of the Austrian and then Prussian empires - one of the most advanced and populous areas of central Europe. Now, two trains a day.

But of course there were road options to get to Przemyśl, and I still had 13 hours in which to get to Katowice. It was only 400km. The main bus station in Lviv, was, however, about 8km south of the city centre. I could get there by getting a couple of trams. I got one to the centre of Lviv. Another would get me to the bus station. It seemed my best bet.

However, after the first tram, still shattered. I passed a cafe where I knew there was power, Wifi, more coffee, and a good breakfast to be had. I went in.

Over breakfast, more googling. Websites suggested that entering Poland from Ukraine could be difficult, and that buses could be delayed "up to nine hours". Other websites suggested that crossing the border on foot could be a good deal faster, if you had an EU or other rich country passport. Also, it was possible to get a marshrutki - a privately owned minibus that goes when it has enough passengers and stops when and where passengers ask - what transport nerds in other countries call a jitney - to Shehyni (Шегині). Of course, this went from the main train station. I therefore got another tram back to the station, and after wandering around for a bit found the marshrutki with "Шегині" on the front.

Photo by Mark Boyd

The ride to the border took an hour and a half. We went down an adequate road with a major European route number through many picturesque towns with beautiful churches and agriculture. There were many horse drawn vehicles, and fields being ploughed with animal and human labour nearby. This place is poor. Still, I was moving in the right direction. One of the cardinal rules of the ancient Confucian art of going with the flow (travel version) is to take any opportunity to move in the right direction, and I was moving in the right direction. I was concerned that I was going to have difficulty crossing the border.

As it happened, no problem. I got to Shehnyi. The queue to cross the border by road was extremely long and slow. The border features a lot of fencing and barbed wire, with a no man's land in the middle. This is an external border of the EU and of the Schengen area. This is a serious rich/poor border. 20 years after the end of communism, Poland is in many ways a fairly normal western country. Ukraine, not.

Photo by Mark Boyd

I walked across. Immigration turned out to be childishly simple, for me, anyway. As at many European borders, there were two lanes, one for "EU, Swiss and other EEA passports", and one for "Other passports". They may as well have just said "Poles", and "Ukrainians", or even "Rich", and "Poor". I was traveling on my British passport, so I walked down the EU line, which took me straight to the front of the line. The "non-EU" line was long and slow. My hunch is that if I had produced my Australian passport or an American or even a Brazilian passport, I would have been directed down the "EU" line. The global apartheid that allows people born in some places to move freely and people born in others to not move freely was as starkly evident has as anywhere I have seen. In truth, this was the starkest Rich/Poor border I have ever seen. Last time I crossed the Mexico/US border on foot I was made to queue like anyone else. American border guards go for equal opportunity humiliation, and that is perhaps fairer, if less convenient to me.

However, having gone through immigration, I still had to go through customs, and that was what this was all about. The entire purpose of this checkpoint is to prevent people smuggling cigarettes. Everyone crossing the border was getting their luggage searched. Everyone was carrying two packets of cigarettes - 40 cigarettes in total.

As it happened, this was perhaps a problem for me, as I was carrying 200 cigarettes. I occasionally bring cigarettes back to the UK for Thaddeus Tremaine, on the basis that they are much cheaper in many of the places I visit than they are in the UK. I had bought some in the Ukraine for him, and had assumed I would be able to bring the 200 cigarettes I am permitted when I enter the EU by air. I suddenly had a problem.

I decided that I would try the "Who, me? I am British." trick. The cigarettes were in the bottom of my rucksack. The official asked me "Cigaretten?" or something similar in something resembling German. It was clear he did not have much English. I could say "yes", and be asked how many, or I could say "no". However, that would be lying, and in such situations it is very important not to lie, as this can lead to trouble. Therefore, I instead said "Only a few" in the hope that he would not understand. This worked, but he still gestured for me to open my bag. I opened the compartment with my dirty underwear and socks in it. That worked well, and he gestured for me to close the bag without further checks. I walked on.

I was in the border crossing at the small Polish town of Medyka. Border crossing points are like military bases - they have the same shabby prefabricated look worldwide. This was no exception. There was a small supermarket, a few bars, some shabby shops selling vaguely Eastern European themed trinkets, money changers, etc.

One thing that was relatively unique to here was that there were a large number of elderly Ukrainian women, all holding two packets of cigarettes and one bottle of vodka to people who walked past. The Ukrainian side of the border was so poor that it was worth these women's while to queue for three hours in the cold in order to make a profit consisting of the difference between Ukrainian and Polish taxes on two packets of cigarettes and one bottle of vodka. These things are not expensive in Poland. The profit for such a journey would be less than $5 - possibly a good deal less. Middle aged and elderly women are the people who hold the country together - I saw this on the train and in many other places - and I felt a certain sympathy that comes from getting a poor lot in life.

I did something impulsive. I walked up to the nearest of these women, and simply handed her the relatively small amount of Ukrainian currency I had in my wallet. This was not much - the equivalent of six or seven dollars - but I just felt like doing it. She looked at me with surprise, but took the money.

However, ten minutes later, I realised that had not perhaps been a great idea. I had very little other money of any kind on me, and there were no cash machines near the border. There were plenty of money changers, but that was all. And there was no frequent transport - no jitneys here. Being a modern western country means that the state runs (or at least regulates) public transport, so obviously it is a lot worse. There were a few white minibuses carrying workers of various kinds to pre-arranged destinations. I could probably have done a deal with one of these people to take me to Przemyśl, but I had no cash. This was still insurmountable - "Take me to a cash machine in Przemyśl and I will then pay you" can be communicated, but these people spoke little English and it was relatively difficult to communicate. It would have been easier to have just held up some banknotes and asked "How much". If I had kept the Ukrainian money, I would have been able to change it to Zloty and I would have had less of a problem. However, I hadn't.

I did have about four Zloty ($1.20) on me, however, and there was a municipal bus, but it only came once every couple of hours. So I waited. I had no money, but (as it happened) I had some cold sausage, bread, cheese, and tinned fish with me, so I made myself lunch.

In a way this was worth it, because in that time, I saw something. A black van pulled up near the border. The black van was mobbed by elderly white haired Ukrainian women, thrusting their cigarettes and vodka through the windows, and being handed small sums of money. This went on for about sixty seconds. At this point another van, with some sort of official logo and flashing lights on top pulled up and honked its horn. The elderly Ukrainian women dispersed. There was no attempt to detain or arrest anyone - merely to stop the women onselling their cigarettes. The black van drove slowly off. I gave the driver the thumbs up. He smiled.

It was better than that, though. As this went on, the skies opened and snow fell. I felt like I was in a cold war movie.

I waited the hour and a half. The bus came. I had soon traveled the 10km to Przemyśl Glowny railway station, noticed that there was a train going to Wrocław at 13.42. Great. Everything was under control. I might even have the chance to quickly visit the Katyn memorial in Katowice before heading for the airport. I bought a ticket. The ticket seller was a helpful young woman who looked like she was paid reasonably and had decent working conditions. I had about 45 minutes. I went from a brief walk around Przemyśl: another of those nice central European cities. Nice church. Nice square. You could spend a nice couple of days here. I found a cash machine, and a bar, and ordered a Żywiec. The beer was good and cold. Seldom have I enjoyed one more.

I got out my laptop and my camera. My hand brushed across the side of the laptop, and felt a memory card sticking out. I swore. I had put the laptop away hurriedly when the drunk Russian returned to my compartment in the middle of the night, and I had not returned the memory card to the camera. Thus the photographs of the border and its barbed wire, long and short queues, and the snow falling on the cigarette smugglers had not been saved. (Just why my otherwise splendid camera pretends to take photographs when it has no card, I do not know). I did not swear as savagely as I had in the middle of the night, but I swore a little bit.

Still, that was life. Things like this happen occasionally. It was still a good story. I have borrowed a couple of photographs that I did not take myself for this part of the journey, but the loss of the photograph of the two vans, one being mobbed by elderly Ukrainian women in the snow is a shame.
I boarded my train.

There were way more stops than this. False advertising.

Soon, I realised that this train was not going quickly. Still, I had five and a half hours, and the distance was less than 300km. Not to worry. On the other hand, I was starting to wish I had checked the arrival time of the train in Katowice. And there was clearly no way I was getting to the Katyn memorial. Still, the train plodded along. It may have been quicker to get the bus, as Poland has spent more money on roads than railways since freedom. Eventually, though, we got to Krakow, At 5.30pm. There was still no problem if we were in Katowice by 7.00pm, and it was only 80km. I was getting a bit nervous, but it still seemed doable. I knew there was a bus service from Krakow to Katowice airport, but I did not know the times. The road from Krakow to Katowice is extremely good (this is the most densely populated area in Poland), and the bus would get me there pronto, but I did not know if there was one at the right time, so I stayed on the train. There was a bus every half hour from Katowice to Katowice airport, and I would surely be there in time. In the worst case scenario I could get a taxi.

Short as the last section of the journey was and important as the city pair was, the journey was really not fast. A nice girl of about 20 carrying a case containing a stringed instrument got into my compartment at Krakow. Her boyfriend helped her onto the train with her luggage, kissed her and seemed to wish her luck in Wrocław, and left the train. I said hello in English and she smiled and greeted me warmly back. She studied sheet music as the train went on. Wrocław contains a particularly beautiful concert hall. I imagined for a moment that she was going there to play, but she probably wasn't.

The journey from Krakow to Katowice is a strange one. The first section is in beautiful rolling hills in the valley of the river Vistula. Krakow itself is a heartbreakingly beautiful city. The train on the next platform was going to Oświęcim, a place better known outside Poland by its German name, and another reminder of the terrible history of this part of Europe.

The train then goes through the Upper Silesian Metropolitan Area, the largest metropolis in Poland. This is an industrial heartland that was built by the Prussians and Germans, and then later run in that delightful way that communist governments ran industry. In 1989 it was one of the most polluted places on earth. Poles from elsewhere still make faces and express puzzlement when you say you have been there.

Now though, it is a strange mixture of industrial, urban, and other. You pass through one centre of communist housing, then you pass the somewhat desolate (but recovering) forest, then an older town with a beautiful church, then a coal mine, then repeat, not necessarily in the same order. As you approach Katowice itself, the urban sections get larger. Katowice itself contains international hotels, shopping streets, bars and restaurants, small shops, large malls, and all the things you find in a civilized urban environment. It is a modern western city. I rather like it.

But there was no time to like it in this instance. The Upper Silesian metropolitan area is a federation of 14 cities, and the train seemingly stopped at all of them, traveling very slowly between. Eventually we got to Katowice station. I wished the nice musician girl a good day and sprinted off the train. I went to another cash machine and withdrew money for cab fare. The bus to the airport was due to depart in a few minutes. It was a nice modern bus, and would generally have been a highly efficient way of getting to the airport, but it was 7.35pm, my flight departed at 8.25pm, and I had no idea how chaotic the airport was going to be, given that this was the first flight to London in a week. Ryanair had stated that gates would close 40 minutes before departure rather than the normal 30, and although the 30 is not normally enforced if you have checked in online, I had no idea what the situation would be. Given I was rushing for my original scheduled flight that had not been cancelled, I was concerned that the consequences would be severe if I missed it. Perhaps I would have to wait for days for another flight with a seat. And I had no idea how much I would be charged if so.

So I jumped into a taxi and asked the driver to take me to the airport. The taxi was a new silver Mercedes. Katowice airport is about 55km from the centre of the city (although it is in the metropolis). There are motorways all the way. The driver instantly realised that I was in a hurry (or perhaps he just liked driving his silver Mercedes fast, as this is what it was designed for), so we sped down the motorway. I watched the meter tick over at high speed. 50 Zloty. 100 Zloty. 150 Zloty. This was as expensive as taking an equivalent taxi journey in Germany. Poland is generally cheap, but if you behave like a rich European you will be charged like a rich European, and that includes staying in an international hotel of getting a Mercedes taxi to the airport. 200 Zloty. 250 Zloty. 300 Zloty.

And it was still a bit more than that when we got to the airport. (And yes, subsequent research indicates that this is several times what that journey should have cost. This does not encourage me to use more taxis in Poland in future. However, I was in such a hurry that there was not a lot I could do about it). But we got there, at about 8pm. The success of a journey of 27 hours had ended up coming down to a frantic last fifteen minutes. I had not withdrawn enough money, so I rushed to another cash machine, went back and paid the driver, went through security, and got my belt horribly caught in my trousers as I desperately tried to take it off to put it through the X-Ray machine.

At that point, though, the security guy made a gesture that translated roughly as "Relax". He could see my flight boarding in the distance, and there was still a queue and there was really no trouble making the gate in time. I didn't quite relax, but I slowed down. A Polish immigration guy scanned my passport. I walked to the gate and boarded the plane. At this point I could relax. I would be asleep in my own bed that evening. As I was.

It was a stressful but interesting journey. And it ended well. I could have done without the taxi fare at the end (which, incidentally, cost more than the train from Odessa to Lviv, the marshrutki to the Polish border, the bus to Przemyśl, the train to Katowice, the flight to London, the train from Stansted Airport to London, and the bus from Liverpool St Station to my home, put together). But one is hit by an unexpected expense once in a while, and the taxi driver got me to my flight, for which he has my thanks.

Comversation in pub.

2010-05-17T15:23:00.006-04:00

"You charged me £2.70 for my pint of Tuborg, but you have a Monday special and it is £2.05"

"Er, sorry, I forgot about that...... Actually, you asked for Fosters."

"No, I definitely asked for Tuborg.

"No you didn't" (Michael is given a refund of 65p, regardless of the difference of opinion).

"Look, I am Australian. There is no possible way I could have ordered Fosters"

A story

2010-05-17T11:55:00.002-04:00

A few years ago, in the days before netbooks, I purchased one of those really expensive miniature Sony laptops. (It cost well over a thousand quid, and it turned out that both the build quality and after sales service were, in my opinion, terrible. But I digress). One of the selling points of this laptop was that it was the smallest laptop available that contained an optical drive. In order to fit the optical drive, they had to find the smallest drives possible. These were made by Matsushita.

Now, when the DVD region coding system was invented, hardware manufacturers paid lip service to it but didn't try hard to enforce it. Thus we have DVD players that can be unlocked by entering a magic code or by flashing alternate firmware. (In a lot of cases, the source code of the firmware was oddly easy for hackers to find). In the case
of DVD drives for computers, hacked firmware is often widely available, as is software to get round the region coding. (VLC has such workarounds built into it, for instance). The only company that took the region coding seriously was Matsushita, and their DVD drives generally still cannot be unlocked. Matsushita also built the thinnest
drives.

Therefore, ultraportable laptops (including my Sony) were just about the only laptops available with DVD drives with region coding that could not be unlocked.

Now, who were the likely customers for such laptops. Well, affluent people who travel a lot, and often take their laptops from one region to another. In fact, the sorts of people who might often find themselves feeling a little lonely in foreign hotel rooms, and who might really like to go and buy a DVD in a local shop before watching it on their laptops. If they wanted to watch a movie on their laptop, they could either download the movie over the internet illegally or go and buy a pirate DVD. Pirates are always careful to remove region coding from their DVDs as they know it annoys their customers.

One can only salute the great genius of the companies who gave us this. One funny thing, though, is that when I tell people it was a Sony laptop, people say "Oh, that's because Sony owns a film studio". However, it isn't. Sony do make DVD drives, and Sony drives have region coding that is easy to disable. (Sony did not makes drives thin enough for my laptop, though, which is why they were not in this instance using their own drives). The hardliners are Matsushita, who did at one point own Universal Studios, but who sold it in 1995. Go figure.

Engineering, or Michael expresses his exasperation with the Italians (again)

2010-04-06T16:06:00.005-04:00

In the middle of 2008, I purchased myself a "bean to cup" coffee machine. The point of such a machine is that you put unground coffee beans in the top and espresso comes out the bottom, basically. I purchased such a machine from the Italian company Gaggia, a very famous brand in coffee. This machine made wonderful coffee, and I finally achieved my long term wish of being able to make myself as good an espresso or latte at home as I can get in a good cafe. It was a fine purchase, and I was very happy with it.

However, late last year, half way through making me a cup of coffee, something horrible happened to the coffee machine's boiler, and it would no longer make coffee. However, as the machine came with a two year warranty, I called the manufacturer, and they said that they would send packing materials, I could then arrange for DHL to pick it up and they would repair it for me. For the then, though, I was stuck with cafetiere coffee and occasional trips to the Algerian cafe down the road (as previously discussed).

I didn't actually manage to send the machine off to them until early February, as I was abroad for most of January. However, once I did, I heard nothing from them. A couple of weeks ago, I called them, and I was told that "There is a backlog in importing parts from Italy". This was a little annoying, but I kept drinking cafetiere coffee, shrugged, and worked on the basis that Italians will be Italians.

Today, though, I received a call from Gaggia explaining that my coffee machine was "beyond economic repair", and that rather than repairing it they would be refunding the money I paid for it. The model is superceded, so apparently the option of simply giving me another one no longer exists. I can of course live with this, but in truth my preference would simply be to have the machine working again. As I said, the machine made superb coffee. I shall just have to buy a new machine with the refund.

Having decided that, a conversation I had with Perry de Havilland a few months back (as a consequence of my mentioning how happy I was with my Italian coffee machine) came to mind. Essentially, he told me that "In Germany, the most prestigious coffee machines are Italian. After all, the Italians know far more about coffee than we do". However, "In Italy, the most prestigious coffee machines are German. After all, the Germans know far more about engineering than we do".

I think I may be buying a German coffee machine.

Redirection

2010-04-04T07:25:00.002-04:00

On Samisdata, I have writted a piece that purports to be about the leg before wicket rule, but is actually about climate change science. I may have stretched things a bit, but I am amused that I was able to do this.

Two different years

2010-03-18T18:43:00.009-04:00

As I have mentioned, my end of year photo posts obey a fairly strict set of rules as to what is included. In addition, they have no explanatory text other than the locality, country, and month.

However, I like to squeeze occasional oblique connections between photos in if I can. For instance, this set contains two pictures of music halls designed by celebrity architects. Also, the two consecutive cathedrals with twin spires are not adjacent accidentally. (People in England sometimes see Poland as a little grim. I don't find it that way myself, and a beautiful Polish cathedral next to a beautiful Parisian cathedral is a nice comparison).

Consider these two photographs.

Huelva, Spain. December 2009.

Baiona, Spain. March 2010.

Unfortunately, these were taken in different years, and so cannot be placed in the same essay. This is a shame. The first photograph is of the Columbus memorial in Huelva, Spain, at the point where the Rio Tinto meet the Rio Odiel. Columbus' voyage began (on August 3, 1492) from a point close nearby, perhaps a mile away across the Rio Tinto in Palos de la Frontera. The monument is absolutely enormous. I have never seen a larger statue celebrating a secular figure anywhere (look at the door on the bottom left), although of course it is presented in a religious style to presumably suggest there was something holy about his mission. The message intended by the size, though, is approximately "Here we commemorate the greatest man in history".

The second photograph is of the Columbus memorial in Baiona in Galicia, where Columbus' ship the Pinta arrived on March 1, 1493, providing the first news to Spain that Columbus had found the New World, although at that point it was still believed to be the Indies. Columbus himself was not on the ship: he was on the Niña, which arrived in Lisbon on March 4. (Both ships then proceeded back to Palos).

I didn't travel precisely to see these monuments, but as it happened I was relatively nearby each of them, and upon learning that I was, I was interested enough to then go and see them. Whereas it took the Pinta seven months to get from Huelva to Baiona, it only took me three months. And interestingly enough, I travelled far, far more miles in between.

These two photograps would have been perfect to stick in an end of year posting without explanation and see if anyone got the connection. There is, I think, just the right amount of not quite obvious about it. As it happens, there are replicas of the Pinta in both places, and another theoretical option would be photographs of the two ships. But this would be too obvious.

In any event, the arbitrary end of the year got in the way so it is all theoretical.

It's European

2010-03-09T20:11:00.003-05:00

When I go out, I carry a fair bit of stuff. A cellphone or more commonly two. Usually a netbook or a full sized laptop. A bit of reading material. An iPod, perhaps. Accessories. A set of earphones. Perhaps an external microphone. Perhaps a camera. I have just replaced a USB 3G modem with a cute MiFi portable router. In winter, perhaps a sweater or other things to keep me warm. Perhaps an umbrella. Perhaps I will soon be carrying an iPad, which may or may not be replacing some of the other devices.

To carry all this stuff, I use a backpack. I have a Swissgear backpack, which I also use as my one piece of luggage if I go traveling for anything less than a week.

However, on a day to day basis, this is actually too big and heavy for what I need. I takes up too much space on trains, and I bump other people. And it is mostly empty. What I need is something smaller with perhaps a shoulder strap, and a few different compartments to stow all my stuff.

Of course, there is a name for this kind of thing. It is called a handbag. The ladies have solved this problem years ago. Having looked at a few of these things lately, I am discovering that the fashionable ones are getting larger, and have all kinds of compartments for weird electronic devices. Some of these things are really quite nice, and I have in some instances looked at them quite enviously.

Is the world changing, or am I just being overcome by metrosexuality?

Redirections

2010-02-28T17:30:00.004-05:00

Patrick Crozier and I recently recorded a conversation about the following of English football outside Europe - particularly in Asia. This can be found here

And, on Samizdata I have been trying to be enigmatic. The story behind this is that several years ago, after I posted one of my annual recaps, there was a joking discussion in the comments trying to figure out what I was doing in those places. One suggestion was that I was a secret agent, and that someone should perhaps attempt to compare my movements with assassinations and other mysterious events around the world. This was amusing. However, in January this year, it happened that I was in Dubai at the exact moment (presumably Mossad) were staking out a particular hotel for an assassination. In fact, I walked past the hotel in question at 3am on the day before the assassination, purely by coincidence. I didn't take a photograph of the hotel in question, but the blurry photograph I posted is of a place quite close. So, for once, my movements did coincide with such an event.

I am not sure this post worked though.

Hassles

2010-02-21T08:37:00.006-05:00

I was in South East Asia recently. In a few days I visited Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Vietnam. I was traveling on an Australian passport, and I needed visas for Vietnam and Indonesia.

In the case of Indonesia, I was able to get a visa at the border, which is basically just a shakedown exercise in which I had to pay $25 to enter the country. Indonesia recently had a scandal in which officials were apparently hiding the existence of a $10 visa for up to seven days, charging people the full $25 charge that applies for up to 30 days, issuing the seven day visa and pocketing the $15 difference. The government solved this corruption problem by abolishing the $10 seven day visa, thus making things better for nobody except the government. Thus I had to pay $25 for just a day's visit, although I didn't realise this until I got there.

In the case of Vietnam, I was able to get a visa at the airport on arrival. This had to be approved in advance. This approval can only be obtained through local travel agents in Vietnam. What one does is send one's passport details to a travel agent in Hanoi over the internet (and pays them a fee - I paid $20). The travel agent then sends the details on to the government, which issues a letter to the travel agent saying that the visa on arrival has been approved. The travel agent then e-mails you a scan of the letter, and you bring this with you to the airport. Once you arrive in Vietnam you pay another $25 fee to the government at the airport, and they issue your visa.

This all seems entirely pointless (and the necessity of the travel agent as a middle man strikes me as dubious), but these sorts of shakedown exercises are actually a big improvement on some of the queuing at consulates and other weird practices at peculiar hours that I have been put through to get visas in the past.

In addition, whenever I entered a country I had to fill out one of those silly forms giving my name, address, name of hotel and other kinds of information that nobody is ever going to read. These forms are big on asking where you are staying for some reason. Often enough I haven't finalized this when I arrive, or I am planning on spending three hours in the airport before heading somewhere else, or such, and so I have mastered the art of simply writing down something that sounds plausibly like the name of a hotel in that city. (In cities I visit regularly, I sometimes use the names of real hotels I am not staying at).

Sometimes you have to keep one part of the form in your passport between arrival and exit, with unknown consequences if you lose it. (In the world's shittier countries, the consequences are "pay a bribe", but in truth I wasn't in the world's shittier countries). I entered Singapore a total of five times and had to fill out the form each time. On one occasion crossing from Malaysia to Singapore, I had no pen on me, but somebody else had left one with purple ink on the desk, which I used to fill out the form. When I got to the immigration desk I was told that it had to be blue or black. The immigration officer was sympathetic and actually made a phone call to see if he could accept the purple, but in the end I was sent back to fill it in again. I shouldn't be hard on Singapore specifically, here. By the standards of the region their procedures are smooth, and they provide free sweets. I do wonder what they do with all the forms though. The principal border crossing between Malaysia and Singapore is crossed by something like a hundred thousand people a day. I cannot imagine that anyone reads any of the forms, let alone all of them, particularly given that most of the same information can be read electronically from people's passports.

The other hassle of traveling in this part of the world is all the different currencies. Specifically, every country has one. One has all the hassle of obtaining local currency, not withdrawing too much, spending all or most of it before leaving the country, and not running it with one last thing to pay before they will let you leave the country. (What is it with "You have to pay the airport tax, and no, we don't take credit cards. In fact, we only take Altarian dollars", anyway).

When I first came to Europe, it was like this too. Different currencies in each country. Lots of border formalities. Even sometimes the need for visas. (Australians needed visas for France and Spain as little as a decade ago). Silly forms. Most of this is gone, now. The Euro and the Schengen agreement have made my life a lot easier. The only people with separate currencies and silly forms are largely now the British, and people like the Russians and Ukrainians. They don't bother me as much now that I am a British national and I live here, but they bureaucratic instinct has become strong in this regard. The EU single market does make Europe a much easier place to travel around. In this regard, I wish ASEAN would follow.

2010-02-19T11:24:00.008-05:00

The following is a sidebar to this post I have written for Samizdata
Portugal has existed as a state since Afonso Henriques, Count of Portugal, achieved independence from the Kingdom of Leon (one of the four kingdoms generally considered the predecessors of modern Spain) and declared himself King Alfonso I of Portugal in 1139. At that point Portugal only consisted of the North of the modern country, but Alfonso pursued a series of conquests that expelled the Moors from much of the south of the modern country. Olivenca fell to Alfonso in 1170, but was retaken by the Muslims in 1189. In 1230, Olivenza was taken from the Moors by the Knights Templar in 1139, ultimately being absorbed into the Kindom of Castille, predecessor to modern Spain. It was reclaimed by Portugal in 1297, during the succession crisis following the death of King Sancho IV of Castille, Leon, and Galicia. Olivenca then remained Portuguese for more than 500 years, although Portugal was in Personal Union with Spain (ie the same king ruled two multiple kingdoms that were theoretically separate) from 1580 to 1640.

In 1373, Portugal signed a treaty of perpetual friendship with England, that remains in force to this day. In 1510, the Ajuda bridge was built across the Guardiana river to the nearby Portuguese town of Elvas. In the war of Spanish succession (that took place between 1701 and 1714), Portugal sided with the British and Prussians against the Spanish and French, in accordance with the treaty of 1373. Olivenca was held by Portugal, but there was fighting in the area and the Ajuda bridge was damaged and made impassable in 1709.

Some endings take time

2010-02-15T09:47:00.007-05:00

In December, I blogged happily about the prospect of receiving new (if unneeded) hardware for free. Alas, though, it did not work out, and I had to send a letter to customer service

In mid-December, I received a (paper) letter stating that Three's network had been recently upgraded in my area and that if I wished, Three would provide me with a new modem at not charge, to take advantage of the faster network. I called the phone number given in the letter and arranged to be sent the new modem. Several weeks later, the new modem had not arrived. Therefore, on January 13, I called Three Mobile again to enquire where it was. The person I spoke to told me that the address that showed up on his computer for my account was my old address (postcode SW18 1DB) that I left in June last year. This was odd, as all correspondence from Three (including the letter that started this) has been sent to my new address (SE1 5HH) for at least six months. He stated that the modem might have been sent to my old address also, and that he would escalate the matter and investigate, and would call me back within two days. This was satisfactory to me. However, he did not call me back within two days, and did not in fact call me back until January 19th. This was not satisfactory to me, and if I had known he would take this long to get back to me, I would have told him not to bother. On January 19, I was in Australia, and when he called me it was 3am local time, and paying considerable roaming charges to receive calls. After a conversation of several minutes that cost me several pounds to have, he eventually told me that it would not be possible to deliver the modem when I was not present, and that I should therefore arrange again to have it delivered when I was back in the UK. I am now back in the UK. I am still using my old modem, which works perfectly but presumably at slower speeds than would a new modem. I am still perfectly happy with the service I am receiving. If Three had done nothing whatsoever, I would have no complaints. However, Three somehow managed to waste my and your time, and to cost me money to achieve nothing whatsoever. That said, if you are able to give me a new modem to increase my broadband speed, I would still find this useful. In fact, if you are able to provide me with one of your MiFi modem/routers instead of a standard modem, I would find that even more useful. I am actually very close to the end of my contract, and would agree to renew the contract for another 18 or 24 months if this is necessary to do so, although I do not wish to lose the particularly low monthly rate I am presently paying (£5 a month for 1Gb).

Thank you

I wonder if I can manage to get fancier hardware out of them than they originally offered? Or am I just leading myself further down the rabbithole?

Bollywood.

2010-01-14T19:19:00.001-05:00

I so totally need to see this

Update

Dubai, UAE. January 2010.

London

2010-01-08T10:53:00.003-05:00

My fancy, expensive Italian espresso machine has broken down. It is still under warranty and everything should be fine soon, but this leads me to the problem of where to go to get my needed doses of espresso. I am living in Bermondsey in South East London at the moment, which is ethnically rich, but has only a few patches of what might be called "globalised London": those areas that are filled with national and particularly international chains of stores, trendy Italianate cafes patronised by yuppies, and that kind of thing. One area that does qualify is Borough, which has its fair share of Starbucks and Caffe Nero outlets, plus other places with Wifi and espresso that are adjunct to fashion museums. It's a nice area, actually. I might consider moving there when I have a bit more income.

One place that almost qualifies is Greenwich, which is today a mixture of traditional working class, people who work at the financial office complex at Canary Wharf, people associated with the various museums and historic sites there, and has also had enough brownfield sites and regeneration that a certain kind of boutique business can operate there. (For instance, the Meantime Brewing Company, which makes specialty beers - quite an ambitious company that you would describe as "independent" but is now a bit too big to count as "boutique"). Anyway, this was one place to go for coffee, so on one day between Christmas and New Year, I went there for coffee. Many businesses were closed but there were lots of tourists around, so the obvious coffee venues with sort of okay coffee (Starbucks and Costa) were packed with people and I went looking for somewhere else as I wanted to avoid the crowds. As it happens, Greenwich is yuppified enough to have Starbucks and Costa, but not so yuppified as to have decent independent coffee shops.

I ended up wandering to a cinema. The Greenwich PictureHouse is one of those cinemas that looks like an arthouse but mostly plays mainstream Hollywood films, and is ideal for those sorts of customers who wouldn't deign to walk into a multiplex but none the less want to see Avatar. I don't tend to go there to watch movies - if I want mainstream Hollywood there are cheaper places with different ambiance but equally good technical presentation in South East London. There is a decent chance of finding an acceptable cafe in such a cinema, though, so I went in hoping to find one. As it happened, there is a Spanish tapas bar in the same building, with a door going directly from the tapas bar into the lobby of the cinema. I went in and asked if I could simply sit down and have a coffee. The waiter's response was "of course" and I sat down and had an excellent Spanish style cafe cortado.

The funny thing about this is that I asked if I could sit down and just have coffee. In a tapas bar in Spain, I wouldn't dream of asking such a thing, as it would be assumed and in fact the bar would be full of people doing just this, or just having a small glass of wine or beer. In Spain there would be a bar as well as table seating, and I would probably sit at the bar. At this place in London, no bar.

Tapas restaurants in London are a little odd. People tend to order tapas style dishes from a printed menu in the way they would at some other restaurant, and to make a full meal of them in one place. They might order a few dishes to share, or they might order these same dishes to consume individually. The Spanish custom of having one small dish with each drink doesn't seem to apply.

I confess I find this general rigidity between "restaurant", "cafe", and "bar" in the UK (and my native Australia, too) rather annoying. I find the Spanish drinking culture far more pleasant than the English drinking culture. You drink over a longer period of time, and you drink small glasses of wine or beer. You also constantly eat little items of food with your drinks, so that "Consume huge quantities of alcohol on an empty stomach" thing that exists in England doesn't apply. (As the place where you would go to consume coffee is the same place you would go to have a beer, it is much easier to (say) drink coffee when you are in the company of people drinking alcohol and you wish to refrain from doing that, too). Tapas works best when you have a large number of bars in a relatively small area of town, and you hop from bar to bar having one drink and one small item of food in each. In some parts of Spain (Madrid, parts of Andalucia, Leon, and the Asturias) the tapas is free: you order a drink and an item of food comes with it. This of course leads to waiters sending complex messages to you about whether they like you are not by what they give you, but it is none the less a nice tradition.

Relatively little of this translates well to London, particularly when you only visit one venue. Which leads to my doing things such as ask whether it is okay to sit in a tapas bar and ask whether I can just have coffee. Many of the people just down the road might have liked to do this, too, but for mostly cultural reasons they didn't.

The other place I have found myself drinking espresso is an Algerian cafe in Old Kent Road. This place sells excellent coffee for half the cost of Starbucks, and people at the other tables are either eating French style pastries or African style chicken dishes with rice. There is a television at the back of the room which is usually showing France 24 (which is full of programs about the minute details of whatever is going on in the EU) and occasionally showing African football matches. (Algeria are playing in the African Nations Cup tomorrow, which might make it a fun afternoon to go there, although it is greatly sad that terrorist scum have ruined that tournament). The background volume in the cafe is a mixture of French and Arabic. It's a no hold bars ethnic place: people of an Anglo background are barely an afterthought. However, as is normally the case, it's completely friendly if I walk in. I am just someone who wants a coffee and my money is as good as the next person's.

Fun.

How I am not cool

2010-01-03T11:30:00.007-05:00

The scene: Sydney, Australia. The year 2000. Michael is talking to a girl

Girl: Have you been to Soho?
Michael: Soho in London, SoHo in New York, or Soho in Hong Kong? Yes in all three cases.
Girl: No, the club in Darling Harbour.
Michael: Oh.

(Girl loses interest and wanders off)

Arbitrary Rules

2009-12-27T13:08:00.004-05:00

I recently posted to Samizdata my annual photoessay summarising my movements for the year (Previous years' efforts are here, here and here). I have a fairly strict set of rules as to how many photographs I allow myself to include in these posts. Basically, it is one photograph for each country I visit on each trip outside England. However, it is more complex than this. The actual rules are as follows:

The question of what is a country is hard to answer around the edges, but I choose a lenient definition. I generally include colonies, special zones with unusual history, and similar as separate countries for this purpose. If a place competes separately from its parent country in international sporting events or even the Miss World pageant, that is usually enough. Similarly, if a region has separate immigration controls from its parent country, that is generally enough. In the UK, I count Scotland, Northern Ireland, and Wales as separate countries. Having a separate ISO 3166-1 code and internet top level domain is a good sign, too, although not an absolute one. Hong and Macau have enough of these things that they get separate photographs, even though China is sovereign. Norfolk Island would get enough of these things to get a separate photograph, although Australia is sovereign. Puerto Rico has enough of these things that I would count it, although the US is sovereign.

Strange forbidden zones in which people may not normally enter and where one is required to give a passport to people in fatigues before entering get separate photographs, even if there is no sense that they are fully sovereign in any way. The two examples of these I have provided photographs for are the Demilitarized Zone between the two Koreas, and the Zone of Alienation around Chernobyl. It happens that in both cases these zones lie on the borders between countries and the zones extend into each country, but in neither case is there any serious doubt as to where the border is. However, the zones have an otherness about them that makes them separate from their countries, so I give them an extra photograph. Any such zones that I enter in future that do not overlap borders will still get extra photographs

Disputed territory gets an extra photograph, assuming there is some substance to the dispute. In this latest post, I provided a photograph of Olivença/Olivenza, which has been controlled by Spain since the Napoleonic Wars, but which is claimed by Portugal in accordance with the Treaty of Vienna which ended those wars. In that set, I put in photographs of Spain, Portugal, and Olivença/Olivenza, which is three photographs. Nobody claims that there are three countries there, but I still put in three photographs.

In order to get two photographs of the same country, with one exception that I shall get to in the next point, I must return to England in the intervening period. If I am in Poland, and I fly back to England for a day, and then return to Poland (as I did this year) I get two photographs of Poland. However, if I move backwards and forwards six times between Poland and Germany without an intervening trip to England, I get one photograph of Poland, one of Germany, and no more.

If I am out of England for the New Year, I may include that trip on the list for both years, but in order to include a country for that year, I must still have visited it in that year. For instance, if I visit Korea in 2006 on the way to Australia, spend the new year in Australia, and then visit Korea again on the way back in 2007, I can include both Australia and Korea for both years. If on the other hand I visit Korea in 2006 on the way to Australia, spend the new year in Australia, and then fly straight back to England with no stop in Korea, I may include photographs of both Australia and Korea for 2006, but only Australia for 2007

In order to count myself as having visited a country, I must have left the transport vehicles and transport infrastructure by which I was traveling. Changing planes in a country without leaving the airport does not count. Going through a country by train and not leaving the train does not count. If I change trains the country does not count if I do not leave the railway station. Driving through a country and not getting out of the car does not count. Driving through a country and getting out of the car but only in service stations does not count.

While the existence of immigration controls is a strong indicator that a country should count, the absence of such proves nothing, as there are many national borders in which there are no controls. The question of whether I have personally gone through immigration controls is of little relevance, however. It is quite common to arrive in an airport, go through immigration controls, and fly straight out again, and this does not count. On the other hand, if there are controls, but they are not manned when I visit, then the country still counts. Similarly, if I enter a country illegally and avoid the controls, the country still counts if it otherwise qualifies

One or two of these rules have been made up to increase the number of photographs I get in these photoessays, but I have not allowed myself to do this without a vaguely convincing reason. The big weakness of these rules is that they do not do long trips to large countries justice. If I wander around Europe or South East Asia for three weeks, I may get half a dozen photographs or more. If I wander around an equally large area of the USA or India or Australia for the same period, I may only get one. However, extending the rules in such instances seems to be going a little too far.

Hardware

2009-12-15T07:21:00.003-05:00

Three Mobile have just upgraded their network near my home from HSDPA Category 6 to HSDPA Category 8. In practice, this means that the maximum download speed I can achieve is 7.2Mbps rather than 3.6Mbps as before. In practice, one never gets close to this speed, but "double the speed" is probably true in the sense that I will get twice what I had before.

The real reason for the upgrade is that as well as doubling the speed, it doubles the capacity of the network. Superior mathematics and code, and superior computational power allows more sophisticated modulation schemes to be used and the bitrate that can be achieved using a given amount of radio spectrum to be greater. When 3G networks first came along, they for some years had significant unused data capacity, but in the last couple of years demand for this has risen dramatically, driven by adoption of mobile broadband and adoption of smartphones such as the iPhone. (Three doesn't offer the iPhone yet in the UK, although most people seem to believe it will soon. The upgrade could partly be preparation for this). Therefore, networks are now being upgraded to newer, higher capacity technologies because they are becoming congested. Three have also recently introduced usage management software, basically meaning that if there is a heavy user in a cell, his usage is restricted sufficiently to allow other users to operate normally.

However, hardware capable of the higher speeds needs to be operating at both ends of the connection. If the user has an old modem not capable of the higher speeds then communication will continue to be at the old speed. So if everybody is using old modems, the network upgrade doesn't improve congestion. Thus Three sent me a letter offering me a new modem "to give you the full benefit of the upgraded network". No charge to me. No extension of contract required. Free as in free.

Of course, I said yes. However, there is a little secret. Upgrading modems to higher HSDPA speeds isn't generally about hardware. It is about software. Older modems are capable of handling the higher speeds just fine, but to do so they need upgraded firmware. Flashing the firmware is not that hard, and I had already upgraded my old modem myself. So Three are not actually getting any benefit out of sending me a new modem. They are simply giving me a spare. However, new hardware is new hardware. Yum.

Mobile phone networks in recent times have been trying to extend contract lengths, as the subsidies they have been paying on new phones have been high and they don't want to pay them as often. However, we here have a reversal. Three are trying to force upgrades on customers early, presumably because (a) network congestion is becoming a real problem and (b) 3G dongles are cheap. That said, I am not expecting them to give out free iPhones mid contract anytime soon.

Also, this particular contract only has about three months to run. I wonder if Three will still offer me a new dongle at the end of the contract, which is the normal practice if I renew.

Update: Thinking about it some more, there is another reason why no network is going to give out free iPhones mid contract, which is that Apple has no trouble getting iPhone users to update their software (including their firmware) whenever it wants them to. iPhone users plug their phones into their computers and sync them with iTunes regularly, and one of the things they do when they do this is upgrade them to the latest software. By providing a smooth software platform through which to do this and by providing lots of new functionality on a regular basis, Apple has given itself the ability to do upgrades that networks want as well as to fix bugs and the like.

This contrasts severely with other phone makers like Sony Ericsson and Nokia. Whilst it is theoretically possible to upgrade firmware on most of their phones, it is not something that customers heave learned to do. For one thing, there is lots of operator customised firmware that needs to be updated too, and operators generally prefer their customers to be using an old version of operator customised firmware than newer versions of unbranded firmware. Secondly, finding new firmware can be fiddly and often involves connecting the phone to a computer, which is usually not done for other reasons. Firmware upgrades over the air involve lots of messing around with network settings and operator policies and data charges and all kinds of stuff. Plus, firmware upgrades tend not to offer new functionality (as the business model here is that you will upgrade your phone when you want new functionality) so customers don't always see the point. If a phone doesn't work properly, the tendency is to take it back to whoever you bought it from, not to mess around with firmware upgrades.

That said, handling firmware updates is probably easier for 3G dongles. When I use the dongle I run a Three branded application on my laptop to manage the connection. This is not strictly necessary - as long as an appropriate driver is installed, both Windows and OS-X can actually manage the connection themselves - but this is the simple way of doing so. Once in a while this application updates itself over the internet, and there is no real reason why it couldn't handle firmware upgrades as well. I suspect though that keeping up with all the different models of dongle and firmware versions and the like is too much hassle for Three. Dongles are cheap enough that it is easier to simply send out new ones when this is called for.

It was of course once the case that PC software was more or less fixed in the state you bought it in with all the original bugs. It was only when being constantly connected to the internet became standard that this business of operating systems and other software constantly updating itself became the norm. This may not have been entirely good - once upon a time software had to work properly when it was released, rather than the now all too common practice of getting something out the door now and fixing it later - but it does at least mean that serious bugs and security issues can be fixed at any time.

This is going to have to become standard in phones as well, and I am sure it will. For the moment, though, this is a real achilles heel for the traditional manufacturers. Over the last couple of years Nokia and Sony-Ericsson have got into real trouble by releasing many high end phones with extremely buggy software. Rates of return for some models have been horrible. (20% or more in some instances). Some of these might have been fixable with firmware updates, but the overall impact has been a tremendous loss of reputation.

Evolutionary cycles

2009-12-13T11:14:00.005-05:00

I yesterday went shopping for an LCD television for a friend of mine. I went to Richer sounds (a splendid and rather uncharacteristic British retailer known for selling high quality electronic merchandise at low prices from relatively unfashionable locations where the rent is low, providing fine customer service and treating employees well), and I ended up buying a Sharp TV. Interesting company, Sharp. People sometimes think the name is a little odd. For what it is worth, the company originally made mechanical pencils for engineering purposes, and they wanted to make it clear that they were very sharp. (True story).

Japanese companies seem to divide into two kinds. There were pre-WWII monoliths - the so called zaibatsus. American policy after the war was that these were far too powerful and that they were to be broken up into smaller companies. This American policy failed. They zaibatsus were theoretically broken up into smaller units, but they retained a complex arrangement of holding companies and cross shareholdings in which management control largely remained in place even though the companies had theoretically been split up. They evolved into post war industrial groupings known as keiretsus. These companies remained politically well connected, and when Japan attempted to grow its exports through government directed industrial policy, these were the benificiaries of it. These keiretsus included Mitsui/Toshiba, Mitsubishi, Hitachi, Matsushita (Panasonic), and others.

As I said, these well connected companies were recipients of government largesse, and those who would wish to praise government industrial policy would tend to construct a story that this led to Japan's industrial success in the 1970s and the 1980s.

But of course, the story is more complex than this, There is a really good book about this, We Were Burning : Japanese Entrepreneurs and the Forging of the Electronic Age by my compatriot Bob Johnstone. The interesting part of the story is that although the keiretsus did benefit from the growth of the Japanese electronic industry, they were not where its innovation came from. The companies that were the heroes in this regard were small, non-existent or unfashionable in 1945, or were disgarded or disdained pieces of broken zaibatsus, In particular, we are talking companies like Seiko-Epson, Canon, Yamaha, or even Sanyo or Honda or Suzuki. (The Japanese government tried to micromanage the car industry, but the motorcycle industry was seen as less interesting, and so that is where the interesting companies ended up coming from).

In electronics, in the 1970s, Sharp's research was led by Sasaki Tadashi, whose enthusiasm earned him the truly glorious nickame of "Dr Rocket" - personally I would almost kill for such. In that era Sharp pretty much invented the electronic calculator and the LCD display. Sharp remains a leader in LCD display technology to this day.

To the extent, that in this day of LCD television, Sharp is the only Japanese company worth mentioning in this market. Sony - a company that rode a totally unique route between the keiretsu and the post war upstart, but which in the end did a better job of selling itself as a brand than an innovator - was the undoubted leader in the era of CRT televisions, but (perhaps as a consequence) totally missed the transition to flat screens. A lot of fancy televisions are sold today under the Sony brandname, but these were generally actually made by Samsung, or (in certain high end cases) by Sharp. The only Japanese company that actually makes televisions today is Sharp. The company that always was the great innovator: the company that Sony pretended to be.

Which is why I was happy to buy such a set for my friend.

I love discount airlines

2009-12-11T13:49:00.003-05:00

And I love the fact that I can write a sentence like "I’ve been trying to get hold of James Waterton myself, mainly because I am going to be in Asia next month and I would like to buy him a few beers and have a chat". As in, I will be on the same continent, so we must catch up, with the understanding that the difficulty and expense of doing so will not be very great.

Grands Slam

2009-11-15T16:49:00.003-05:00

In the sport of Rugby Union, there is a regular yearly competition between the strong countries of Europe. These days this includes Italy and is now the Six Nations Championship, but when I was a child it was the five nations: the five nations in question being England, Ireland, Wales, Scotland, and France. One of the peculiarities of this tournament is that winning the tournament is a less big deal than how you do it. Winning every game is a so called "Grand Slam", and this gets much more kudos than simply winning the tournament. The winners of the Six Nations also seems to win the Grand Slam about every second or third year.

As it happened, Ireland won the Grand Slam in the Six Nations Championship at the start of this year. This was a big deal for them: it was only the second time they had won it, and the first time in 61 years.

However, as it happens, achieving a Grand Slam in Rugby wasn't just a five nations thing. Back in the days when international travel was hard, the teams from the Rugby Union playing nations of the southern hemisphere would only tour the British Isles every few years. When they did so, they would play one test against each of Ireland, Scotland, England, and Wales. Winning all four games was the same achievement that would be required of France to win the Grand Slam in the then Five Nations, and also became known as winning the Grand Slam, or at least it did in the southern hemisphere rugby nations.

Winning a Grand Slam this way was never easy, and prior to 1984, it was only ever done five times: by South Africa in 1912, 1931, 1951, and 1960, and by New Zealand in 1978. In 1984, it was achieved by Australia for the first time. I can remember this, and it was a huge occasion in Australian rugby. A lot of rugby fans in Australia would still describe it as the biggest moment the sport has ever had in Australia, and Australia have won the World Cup - twice - since then. This was the first time Australia had ever put a world beating rugby team on the field. Prior to that Rugby Union had always been a (very) poor relation to Rugby League in Australia and the Rugby Union team had almost always lost badly to New Zealand, South Africa, and the stronger British and French teams. Since then, Australia has been one of the leading powers in the game.

However, even before the 1984 tour was played, the various governing bodies had decided that it would be much easier for their schedules if touring sides were not playing all four home nations in the same season. It was decided that in this age of easier travel, the southern hemisphere sides would come twice as often and only play two of the four nations on each tour. This decision was unpopular with the boards in the Southern Hemisphere countries, because a tour in which a Grand Slam is a possibility is a bigger deal than one where it isn't. The boards in the British isles on the other hand either didn't realise this or didn't care.

However, the southern hemisphere boards discovered that they could negotiate with individual nations, and try to get additional tests added to these two test tours. I remember in 1996 Australia managed to get Wales to agree to add a game to a tour that already had Ireland and Scotland, and Australia tried very hard to get England to agree to a game too. When England refused to substitute a test match for a charity game at Twickenham between Australia and the Barbarians, I recall Australian officials getting very abusive, too. And it was a shame, because Australia had a pretty good side that year and won the three tests against Scotland, Ireland, and Wales quite convincingly. A final game at Twickenham for the Grand Slam would have been great.

Since then, Southern Hemisphere tours of Europe have become more common, and any regular structure is gone. Australia, South Africa, and New Zealand tour Europe most years, and fit in various combinations of tests with the four Home Nations, France, and Italy. They play all these teams fairly frequently, but there is still a lot of prestige attached to a Grand Slam tour of the British Isles for historical reasons, and winning a Grand Slam is a big deal, because it has been done so infrequently. South Africa managed to schedule Grand Slam tours in 1998 and 2004, but could not win the Grand Slam on either occasion. New Zealand scheduled Grand Slam tours in 2005 and 2008, and won the Grand Slam on both occasions, which probably made their inability to win World Cups even more annoying for them.

However, this year, Australia finally managed to schedule a Grand Slam series, for the first time since the famous 1984 tour. They are not seen has having a very strong side this year, having lost most of their southern hemisphere matches to New Zealand and South Africa, and were only given odds of 7/1 before the tour. Last weekend, they played England, and played well enough to win reasonably confortably , despite some problems in the line outs. They were ecstatic at the end of the game, mainly because the Grand Slam possibility made it a much bigger occasion that it would have been otherwise. Today against Ireland, the line outs were again a problem, but Australia none the less led for almost the entire match. Their defence was good, and they spent the last ten minutes defending a 20-13 lead. It looked like the Grand Slam was still on.

Except, Ireland got through in the last couple of minutes, and scored a converted try to draw the match 20-20. The Grand Slam is not happening this year. There is no disgrace in drawing with or even losing to Ireland at the moment - after all they won a Grand Slam themselves at the start of the year. However, if Australia beat Scotland and Wales, which they may not, they will really see this as a chance for glory that got away. There is a sense perhaps that a chance for a great occasion may have been lost. Australia should beat Scotland next weekend. A final game in front of a huge crowd in Cardiff against Wales for the Grand Slam could have been fun.

Oh well, though. If these things were easy, they would not be such a big deal when they do occur. Hopefully we will not have to wait for another 25 years before Australia get another chance to do this.

What is interesting, though, is that my Northern Hemisphere rugby friends largely missed why the southerners were taking this so seriously. This type of Grand Slam is not something thought of much by northern fans, possibly because it is something their own teams cannot win. but it's quite a big deal for us.

Languages

2009-11-09T04:58:00.003-05:00

In my post on Samizdata about visiting Chernobyl, I use the Latinised form of Russian rather than Ukrainian spellings of place names - for instance Chernobyl and Kiev rather than Chornobyl and Kyiv - as these were the forms in use at the time of the disaster and these remain the names most commonly used outside the Ukraine and are hence likely to be the forms most familiar to my readers. Since the Chernobyl disaster, Ukraine has become an independent nation and has adopted Ukrainian rather than Russian as its official language, and this change has included encouragement of foreigners to use Latin transliterations of Ukrainian rather than Russian spellings of local place names. When a Latin script is used locally, one now sees Chornobyl and Kyiv. However, the world outside still tends to use the Russian forms.

Apple play a devious game.

2009-11-07T16:59:00.002-05:00

The desktop PC that I built five years ago has this year died, had various pieces replaced with parts bought on ebay, and been rebuilt. At the end of this it was still unreliable, slow, and sufficiently frustrating to use that I was not using it any more, and was instead using my laptop most of the time. This was not ideal, as I have two very nice screens on the desk in my study. I could have plugged the laptop into one of these and used it at my desk, but this seemed wrong, somehow. In any event, constandly connecting and disconnecting the laptop from the screen and/or other peripherals in my study was just a nuisance.

So, I decided I needed a new desktop machine. Over the last couple of years I have returned to Apple. The first computer I ever used was an Apple II back in 1981, and I used these and (later) Macintoshes until about 1998. From 1988 or so, I used Unix machines in university and scientific environments as well. I actually almost never used a DOS or Windows machine until 1998, but I moved to Windows then for a mixture of work related reasons and because Apple as a company had lost its way and appeared to be dying.

However, Apple did of course not die, and Microsoft lost its way over the last decade. By developing OS-X on a Unix foundation, it managed to swallow up a lot of the Unix community as well. (Like everyone else, Unix geeks have been moving to laptops, and Mac laptops are the best Unix laptops by far). I rather delayed coming back, but a couple of years ago I bought myself a Macbook Pro, which has turned out to be the nicest laptop I have ever owned, by far. The Snow Leopard upgrade a couple of months back has improved its performance. It still feels like a brand new laptop and has none of the sluggishness that Windows machines seem to get after a couple of years.

So, having decided to buy a Mac desktop, I this week bought a Mac mini. Since being upgraded earlier this year, the mini has had quite a nice spec, including decent nvidia 9400 graphics with dual monitor support. Apple gave the mini a minor speed bump a couple of weeks ago, which gave me a great chance to get the just superseded early 2009 model cheap. As it happened, I bought it "refurbished" from the Apple store for £339. The computer may have been a return, or might have been and end of model sale. But it was cheap, and looks and feels as good as new. This was theoretically the low end model with a 2.0 GHz Core 2 Duo CPU and 1Gb of RAM and a 120Gb hard drive. My intention was to upgrade the hard drive (probably to a 320Gb or 500Gb 7200rpm unit) and RAM at some point. I probably still will, but the machine that was shipped to me actually has 2Gb of RAM, meaning that the RAM upgrade isn't particularly urgent.

The Mac mini comes in a very small box which does not include a screen, mouse, or keyboard. Apple have always sold it as being a relatively inexpensive machine allowing people who have these things already to switch to Apple. People who want a fully new machine from the ground up should buy an iMac. And this suited me fine. The Mac mini is plugged into my (lovely) 24 inch Dell screen that has a few years of life left in it, and the (also nice, but older) 19 inch Sony screen I have sitting next to it will be plugged in also once the mini Display port to DVI adaptor that I have ordered on ebay arrives and I gain the ability to plug it in. And the (Compaq branded) USB keyboard and (Sony branded) USB mouse that I have plugged into the mini do indeed work perfectly.

However, they look wrong somehow. These are dark coloured and clunky bits of PC hardware. They look way too utilitarian to go with the Mac. And the keyboard has a Windows key instead of an Apple key. I can almost feel the urge to go and buy a Mac keyboard and Mac mouse for purely aesthetic reasons. Apple were not lying when they stated that "Most users will have compatible hardware already", but I fear they also understand that people - think "this is wrong" - and go and buy an Apple mouse and keyboard, and that this way Apple get much higher margins on them than they would have had they just put them in the box with the computer.

Except, of course, they do not fit in the box. If a keyboard had been included, Apple couldn't sell the Mac mini in such a cool, small box. And knowing Apple, this is quite possibly a fair bit of the reason.

Nonsense

2009-11-06T06:38:00.004-05:00

On Wednesday evening, I was boarding a plane at Bremen airport in Germany. Earlier in the day, I had purchased a plastic bottle of Diet Coke, had consumed half of it, and then closed it and put the bottle in my rucksack. Of course, I then forgot about it. When I put the same rucksack through the X-Ray machine at the airport, it showed up and I was asked to remove it from my bag. I asked if I could simply drink the contents rather than have it confiscated. I was told that, yes, I could, but in order to do so I would have to take it back outside the secure area, drink it, and then go through security again.

I am almost tempted to offer a prize for the most creative reason that anyone can imagine for such a rule. Do they think I am going to explode if I drink non-approved Diet Coke on the wrong side of the metal detector? Even if they do, in what way would my exploding outside the secure area make things better?

A tale of woe, and a small plea

2009-10-29T14:25:00.003-04:00

I have been taking digital photographs for about six years now. A year ago, these were mostly stored on the hard disk of my principal desktop computer at the time. I had backups on hard drives on a couple of laptops and also on some CDs and DVDs. Backups of recent files were in order, but older backups were not very well organised.

In March this year, I decided to fix this and simultaneously better organise everything by importing all my photos into iPhoto on my Mac laptop and then backing this up with Time Machine. Impatient about the idea of importing everything over my home network, I removed the (PATA) hard drive from my desktop, and put it in an external hard drive enclosure I had around. This worked fine, and I backed up some of my photos. I then discovered that I needed the hard drive back in the original desktop, and so I removed it from the external hard drive enclosure and plugged it back into the PATA connection of the desktop.

At this point , disaster. The hard drive would no longer work. Foolishly, I had left the motherboard plugged into the power when I plugged the hard drive back in. The CPU was not spinning and I believed the hard drive power cable was not live when I plugged the drive in, but perhaps the power was in fact live. Or perhaps some sort of static discharge occurred. In any event, the hard drive that had the only complete copy of my photo collection had failed. My belief was (and is) that the electronics on the hard drive was fried.

I then looked for my older backups. I found that one of the DVDs that had contained backups was physically broken, which presumably happened when I moved house. Another was unreadable. Still, however, I was able to retrieve about 80% of my photo collection from backups. However, I have lost some photographs from 2005 and 2006: specifically the some (but not all) of those of two trips to the US from 2005, and one trip to China and one to Korea from 2006, as well as a small number of European photos from those years.

I decided that the lost photographs were of sufficient value to me that I was willing to pay for data recovery if possible, so I sent the hard drive to a data recovery company. I chose it from advertising and online recommendations: I have no idea if I chose well. From certain aspects of their customer service that I will not go into, it is more likely that I chose badly than not.

My belief was that the drive simply had electrical problems, but the data recovery company claimed that

The primary failure is a failure of the read/write heads. The read/write heads have also made contact with the platter surface causing media damage and unreadable sectors. These unreadable sectors span the disk surface causing corruption. There is also a PCB fault.

It is entirely possible that they were exaggerating the damage in order to increase the price. After a little negotiation, I agreed to pay £450 on a no data no fee basis.

After several months in which I didn't hear from them, the data recovery company finally told me that they had been unable to get the hard drive to respond to a replaced PCB, and they returned the hard drive (and the spare PCB - they presumably sent this to me to show they had tried).

So, I was back where I started. I get the feeling it may be worth having one further try with another data recovery company, assuming that someone is willing to try. The model is a Hitachi hds722516vlat80

However I need to find the best experts I can find - preferably Hitachi specialists. Any thoughts as to who I might ask?

The joys of indoctrination

2009-09-05T15:50:00.001-04:00

When I was at primary school in Australia in the 1970s, the curriculum still had a certain colonial quality about it. I recall a spelling book which was full of dictation exercises containing passages talking about how the Queen had been received on her visit to India and discussing how "the Commonwealth makes good sense" and blah blah blah. Mixed in with this, we of course got the requisite stuff about polar exploration, and all the inspiring stuff about the heroic Scott and Shackleton and all that, with the nice fact being mentioned that probably the third most distinguished Antarctic explorer from the British empire (Mawson) was an Australian. Mixed in with all this was the sad acknowledgement that the first man to the South Pole was in fact Roald Amundsen, a Norwegian. What I was taught even included remnants of the standard British disparagement of the man, which was that he simply ran an efficient, straight to the Pole there and back expedition, whereas the heroic Scott was somehow on a morally higher plane for having scientific motives as well as the simple desire to be first to the pole, and that there was something not fair about Amundsen slaughtering some of his dogs and eating the meat, etc etc etc. Even to the young me, it was fairly clear that there were some sour grapes in this, and that Amundsen would likely have been written about as the greatest of heroes if he had done everything exactly the same had he happened to have been British. Plus there was the fact that Scott ate his horses. The only real difference was that Amundsen was smart enough to take the correct animals with him.

Of course, if I had gone to school in Norway, I am sure I would have found Amundsen talked about as the greatest of heroes, so the man certainly doesn't fail to get his due. It is just that he achievement was received with a certain amount of bad grace by the British.

One key point about the fact that Amundsen and Scott got to the South Pole within a few weeks of each other is that there is absolutely no doubt that they both got there. Amundsen left physical evidence behind, and Scott found that physical evidence a few weeks later and confirmed that yes, Amundsen had reached the pole.

Somehow, though, this morning, for the first time in about 30 years I found myself thinking about polar exploration. Wandering around Wikipedia, I found myself reading about Arctic exploration rather than Antarctic. My schooling spent more time discussing the Antarctic, probably mainly because the British were involved. The Arctic had been done by Americans, largely, and this was seemingly mentioned briefly, with a footnote that the reason why Amundsen went to the South Pole was because he had wanted to be the first man to the North Pole, but had changed his direction in 1909 upon discovering that Robert Peary had reached the North Pole. After Peary had reached the North Pole via surface travel, Richard Byrd of the US Army had then become the first man to fly over the North Pole in 1926

However, to my surprise today, I discovered that there is now pretty clear evidence that neither Peary nor Byrd got to the North Pole. Both apparently made sincere attempts to get there, encountered difficulties before getting the whole way, turned around and returned to civilization claiming falsely that they had made it.

Who led the first expedition that can be unequivocally confirmed to have reached the North Pole? Well, that was a Norwegian expedition which travelled there by airship in 1926, a few days after Byrd's claimed flight. The leader of that Norwegian expedition? One Roald Amundsen. Amundsen is justly famous for having led the first expedition that got to the South Pole. However, he almost certainly also led the first expedition that reached the North Pole as well. Amundsen did not land, and the first people to set foot on the Pole were apparently the crew of a Soviet aircraft who landed there in 1948. And the first expedition to reach the pole by surface transport (rather than an aircraft or submarine) apparently did not do so until 1968. A lot of these people did not realise that they were pioneers, because Peary's claims were accepted for a number of decades. Who was "first to the pole" depends on definitions, but giving it to Amundsen seems reasonably fair.

I am slightly disturbed that I did not know this until now. I suspect I probably would have if I were Norwegian.

This is obvious, really

2009-07-10T05:18:00.003-04:00

With most mobile phone networks in Britain, when you call regular customer service the call is forwarded to someone in India. If the person on the other end of the call solves my problem efficiently, I am fine with this. When things don't work, the problem is ultimately caused by poor systems and poor management at the network, usually. For instance, I had a customer service issue with Vodafone (caused by a screw up at their end) in which it was impossible to be helped by the same person twice, and different people kept failing to understand things that I had already explained to one of their colleagues. Bad service. On the other hand, for a recent issue I had with Three (caused by a screw up by the Royal Mail) the first person who helped me took my number, and said he would escalate the problem and call me back when it was resolved, which he did. Good service.

However, there is one option in the phone menu that will always get you to someone in the UK, and that is selecting "I wish to cancel my phone". When you select this from just about any network, you get someone with a friendly Northern English or Scottish accent from the "customer retention" department, whose job it is to talk you out of leaving. These people will ask you why you are leaving, and have the power to offer you much better deals that people in, say, the network's retail shops. Such people walk a relatively delicate line, because if someone genuinely does wish to cancel they have a legal right to do so and the network must not refuse them, but it is their job to keep you on the line if there is some chance you will renew your contract.

If you genuinely do want to cancel your phone, there is a game to be played to get it over with quickly. Basically, you tell lies that are unanswerable by the person on the other end of the phone. "I am leaving the country" is a good one, but only works if you are doing a straight cancellation. If you are instead asking for a PAC code to port your number to another network, that doesn't hold up. Things like "This phone is in my name, but my ex-girlfriend used it. We have now broken up and she wants to keep her number" will usually work. Or one can just get confrontational and insist, but I don't like to do that.

Sometimes though, you say you want to cancel when you have absolutely no desire to cancel. This comes down to what I said earlier: the customer retentions department has the power to offer you a better deal than any other part of the organisation. Usually, though, they will not make their very best offer unless you seem sincere about leaving, and it turns into an experience akin to haggling in a market. It is very hard to know how low they are able to go, as the level of desperation to keep customers varies depending on how close to their monthly quotas they are, how badly they think the stockmarket will react to news that they have lost fifty thousand customers, and that kind of thing. Therefore, haggling exists here for the same reason it exists in markets - the seller does not want to reveal to the buyer how low he can go unless he absolutely has to, and he does so in the hope that the buyer will agree to pay more. I am reasonably good at this, but I suppose I should note that the cheapest deal I have ever obtained was received when I rang up genuinely intending to leave and they genuinely talked me out of it. (As a consequence of this, I generally carry two mobiles. That said, having a second number that is only known to my close friends has something to be said for it to).

In any event, the cheapest mobile deals to be had in the UK generally come from taking out a contract, letting it come to its end, and then calling the customer retentions department and threatening to leave.

Yesterday, however, I did something different. I have had a mobile broadband contract with Three for the last 12 months, for which I pay £10 a month for 1Gb of data. This isn't a huge allowance, but is generally plenty for those occasions I am away from home and where there is no free WiFi. However, I bought that original contract at a bad time. Three have at various times had 25% off or 50% off deals on this contract. In fact, I obtained a £5 a month deal for one of my friends during one of these offers. (Hi Brian). Therefore, I yesterday simply rang up the customer retentions department, and asked if they could give me the same deal. The response from the nice Scottish woman was "Let me check. Yes, sure, I can offer you that. It's nice to get someone who knows exactly what he wants".

Somehow, this seems deeply wrong, as the game of elaborate lies was missing. I suppose, though, that it was akin to knowing a fair price for something in a market, offering it, saying "take it or leave it", turning around to walk out, and seeing if the stallholder stops you. The woman at the other end of the phone seemed pleased. I suppose there is a fair chance she is paid on commission, and gets commission for a contract renewal, and someone who does a deal immediately without 15 minutes of lying and/or threatening to hang up is quite an efficient use of her time.

What does this mean?

2009-05-22T07:30:00.003-04:00

This morning, I woke up at about 5am. I had a flight to Santiago de Compostella booked that departed at 8am. This had cost me some money (a few tens of pounds) a few months back. As it happened, I imagined climbing out of bed, the struggle through various means of transport to Stansted airport, security lines, flying through the need for more sleep, a bus into town at the Spanish end, and then finding and checking into a hotel.

At that point I decided to roll over and fall back to sleep. I now quite considerably regret this, as if I had done everything correctly, I would now be sitting in a tapas bar with some jamon iberico and a glass of red wine, or perhaps admiring a cathedral.

On the other hand, what does this mean? Possibilities.

I am finally growing up.
I am depressed.
I am ill.

On the other hand, I do genuinely regret this. I will get up and make the plane next time.

On the other hand, if I meet the love of my life at the party on Saturday night that I wouldn't have been able to go to if I were in Galicia, I guess it will make a good story.

(Sorry RSSers).

Sofia, Bulgaria. January 31, 2009.

2009-02-01T09:55:00.006-05:00

On that nodescript Buenos Aires photograph

2008-12-30T13:09:00.003-05:00

There is a certain art to putting together a post like this. You don't necessarily post your "best" photos, and you certainly don't post images of the sorts of things commenter "Raul" mentions (all of which I did take photographs of) because a post could equally well be compiled by buying 20 picture postcards and scanning them will not be a very interesting post. If I do post a classic "picture postcard" image, then that probably indicates that (for whatever reason) I had relatively few pictures to choose from for that destination. Of course, I did post one of Argentina's classic "picture postcard" images two photos below, but I allocated it to Brazil (which is fair, as I was in Brazil when I took it and the foreground is in Brazil). As it happens, I spent most of three weeks in Argentina, took around 2000 photographs, and I had considerably more photographs to choose from than any other country on the list, and it took me a long time to decide what to post. I toyed with re-using this photograph that I took near Tunayan in Mendoza province (in which amongst other things I like the fact that what initially appears to be clouds in the background is actually the Andes and this becomes clear when you take a second look). Then I thought of posting this photograph of Santiago Calatrava's footbridge in Puerto Madero in Buenos Aires, but it would have been the second structure designed by the same architect in the post, plus I don't think it really captures as much of the spirit of the city as I would have liked. Then I thought of showing the great arched trainshed at Estacion Retiro (with its interesting contradiction that one of the greatest railway stations in the world hosts very few trains) but didn't quite have the right photo, and I had already posted another railway station. Then I thought of perhaps showing some of the beautiful riverside buildings and bridges at Tigre, but that was slightly too close to picture postcard territory, although the very Englishness of some of the buildings would have given it an interesting twist. Then I thought of showing a picture of the memorial to the dead of the 1981 war, but I conluded it was too sombre (and whatever it is, Buenos Aires is not a sombre city). Then I thought about my first morning in Buenos Aires. After a very tiring flight from Madrid the previous evening and a night's sleep, I stumbled from my hotel the next morning, and just about the first thing I saw was an ice cream shop named after the Malvinas. A thought of "okay...." went through my mind, and I took my first photograph of the trip. Definitely, though, the rules I have set myself as to how many photographs I post to posts like this do serve countries like Argentina (and the US, which got very short shrift last year) badly. The rule is essentially "One photograph for each country I visit on each absence from England". Thus a country I visit for three weeks gets one photograph, as does a visit to a border town for an afternoon. In South America I spent two days in Chile, less than one day in each of Brazil and Uruguay, and three weeks in Argentina (where I of course had a wonderful time) and the four countries get one photograph each.

I'm proud. Also slightly scared

2008-07-21T16:34:00.000-04:00

96% Geek

Created by OnePlusYou

Warsaw, Poland. 28 June 2008.

2008-07-05T07:52:00.001-04:00

Life milestones

2008-06-27T06:29:00.004-04:00

My application for British citizenship has just been approved. I am not a British national yet, as I have to attend a ceremony and swear an oath of allegiance to the Queen first. I already owe allegiance to the same Queen wearing a different hat (or should it be crown), but this does not count. As I have just moved, the ceremony will be one held by Wandsworth council and not Tower Hamlets council. This is kind of a shame, as I suspect the Tower Hamlets ceremony might have been slightly more colourful.

This does not affect my Australian citizenship, although Australian law was only changed to allow Australians who took out foreign citizenship to keep their Australian citizenship in 2002 (*). It does not affect my right to live in the UK, which I had already, and it does not give me any additional voting rights, as I have had full voting rights since the moment I moved here. (Britain gives full voting rights to citizens of all Commonwealth countries resident in the UK. When I was student here, I rather weirdly had the right to vote or indeed to become Prime Minister, without having any right to work or to live here for more than a short finite period).

Where it does help me is that it means that if I want to leave the UK in the future and come back, I will have voting rights while I am away and the unconditional right to return, whereas the type of permanent residency I had ("Indefinite leave to remain") can be lost after two years absence. Also, as an EU citizen I will have treaty rights that I do not have now, including the right to live and work anywhere in the EU (and in Switzerland, Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein under other treaties). If I ever want to (say) retire to Portugal, I now can.

And of course I can get in the short queue at British airports.

The one thing I shall lose is my right to stand for federal Parliament and/or become Prime Minister of Australia, as the Australian constitution forbids anyone who holds foreign citizenship from taking a seat in parliament. I could still theoretically stand for one of the Australian state parliaments, although heaven forbid that I would want to do such a thing ("You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy...").

(*) Curiously, dual Australian/other citizenship was allowed prior to that in all other cases, including allowing foreigners who were naturalised as Australians to keep their foreign citizenship, and in cases where people got combinations of Australian citizenship and some other through birth. Everyone recognised that the situation was anomalous, both political parties were in favour of changing the law, and yet somehow governments failed to get around to changing it. It was to be voted on soon when Labor was voted out in 1996, but the new government (despite theoretically supporting the change) decided to set up a new commission to investigate the matter etc etc which ultimately reached exactly the same conclusions as the previous one, and then finally managed to change the law in 2002. In the mean time, enforcement of the previous law had been changed somewhat. The previous law had allowed anyone who had lost Australian citizenship upon taking out foreign citizenship to apply to resume their citizenship, if they would have suffered "significant hardship or disadvantage" if they had not taken out foreign citizenship. By the time the law was changed, having to spend time in the long non-EU nationals queue at a British airport was considered a "significant hardship".

Actually, having spent a lot of time in such queues (particularly at Stansted on Sunday nights) I do rather see the point.

Stockholm, Sweden. May 24

2008-05-24T18:03:00.004-04:00

This photograph was taken at 2.30am. I am far enough north that there is natural light in the sky, even at that time. The fast lens and big sensor makes it look a little brighter than with the naked eye, but it is still something that the more equatorial of us are not used to.

Doing it by country is a bit misleading

2008-05-22T14:17:00.001-04:00

This is starting to be a good effort

2008-05-18T20:14:00.001-04:00

Create your own travel map or travel blog

Visit TripAdvisor.com

Iguaza Falls, Argentina. May 14.

2008-05-18T11:54:00.015-04:00

The fuzziness at the top right of my head is the haze from the waterfall, which is a long distance behind me. It causes an interesting optical effect, doesn't it.

Tunuyán, Argentina. May 8

2008-05-08T22:54:00.000-04:00

This is Argentina

2008-05-07T19:04:00.005-04:00

Imagine you go on a tour of a winery in Argentina. Imagine that they split the group, and there is one tour guide speaking Spanish and one speaking English. Imagine that you are the only Anglophone on the tour, and therefore the English speaking guide gives you a one on one tour. Imagine also that the English speaking guide looks like this.

Imagine also that you have a longstanding weakness for Latin women with black hair and brown eyes. I assure you, the whole experience is like having a bullet fired through the forehead.

Perceptions can stick

2008-05-01T10:12:00.002-04:00

It is certainly true that I have a history of being a cricket obsessive, although I have become disillusioned with the sport a little bit in recent months. This is perhaps why, despite what Alan Little posts, and despite requests from Brian Micklethwait for analysis, I don't think I have even mentioned the Indian Premier League on the web, and I have barely mentioned it in person to anyone. My disillusion is perhaps partly responsible for this lack of excitement. Perhaps also I have just been distracted by my own life.

Simple summary of the state of affairs. Does the rise of the IPL indicate the end of the cricket world as we know it? Very probably yes. Is this a good thing? Very probably yes also, although I would prefer they were playing a longer form of the game rather than the 20 over silliness. Do I have the inclination to research and write about this in detail at the moment? In truth, no.

Buenos Aires, Argentina. April 27.

2008-04-28T09:25:00.000-04:00

Munich, Germany. April 14

2008-04-16T17:07:00.011-04:00

Update: In case Brian has caused anybody to wonder, the building is the Haus der Kunst, which was built for propaganda purposes by the Nazis between 1934 and 1937 as a museum for what they saw as wholesome, non-decadent (ie bad) German art. It is still used as an art museum, but these days it has a nightclub in the basement.

Well done me, I think

2008-04-08T05:49:00.003-04:00

I received a letter from my ISP the other day, telling me that I had breached the "reasonable use policy" on my "unlimited" plan. They did this the right way. It was a polite letter pointing the policy out, stating that according to their terms they could throttle my connection in peak periods or disconnect me, but stating that they would prefer to do neither and asking me to reduce my usage. My response to the letter will be to, indeed, reduce my usage.

Still, there something absurd about a world in which "unlimited" means that there actually is a limit, but that we will not tell you what it is until you breach it.

2008-04-05T06:44:00.002-04:00

Another good thing about the K850i is the built in accelerometer. It doesn't use it nearly as well on the whole as does the iPhone, but for moblogging it is a godsend. Unlike with the K800i, for which uploaded photographs with the wrong orientation can be a serious problem, this phone remembers how you were holding it when you took a photograph. The photograph is therefore always uploaded to your blog with the correct orientation

Bath. April 5

2008-04-05T06:19:00.001-04:00

Bath, England. April 4

2008-04-04T08:51:00.001-04:00

London, April 1.

2008-04-01T11:31:00.001-04:00

The K850i still has issues with the white balance, I fear.

I love London.

2008-03-30T10:56:00.001-04:00

Just out of interest

2008-03-14T14:08:00.003-04:00

I upgraded my phone in January, and all the photos posted to this blog this year have been taken with a Sony-Ericsson K850i rather than a K800i. This has a 5 Megapixel rather than a 3.2 Megapixel camera. I think the quality is quite lot better. The new camera handles low light and shots with flash much better than the old one.

Sadly, though, I think the phone may have gone backwards in other ways. Sony-Ericsson fixed the two most annoying things about the K800i: the lens cover that came open in your pocket and the SIM slot under the battery. However, they messed around with the user interface and controls on the main keyboard. This is a shame, given that this was the area in which the K800i was right the first time. This is annoying, and I think it means the K850i is not going to be quite as successful as the K800i (which was a huge hit). Shame

A camera in my phone that is good enough for day to day photography needs for web publishing has been a holy grail of mine for a while. I don't carry a dedicated camera everywhere, but I do take a phone. this desire on my part has led to me upgrading phones a good deal more often than I would have otherwise, which is probably what the phone manufacturers want. I'm still not there, but I might only be a couple of more phones away. 5 Megapixels is plenty - it is all about sensor quality now. (Actually I am aware that it has been all about sensor quality for several phones now, yes). There are one or two phones available now with optical zooms, although I am not sure how important that is. I guess I will see next upgrade.

London, March 9

2008-03-09T08:23:00.000-04:00

London, March 5

2008-03-05T11:32:00.001-05:00

Sopot, Poland. February 24

2008-02-24T09:30:00.001-05:00

2008-02-11T12:24:00.001-05:00

2008-02-11T11:20:00.001-05:00

2008-02-04T11:15:00.001-05:00

Vest

2008-02-02T12:44:00.001-05:00

2007-12-17T18:28:00.000-05:00

This is another photograph that relates to a comment I left elsewhere.

St Pancras snaps.

2007-12-01T09:49:00.000-05:00

See my comments here for some accompanying exposition.

Quite possibly

2007-11-27T19:07:00.001-05:00

Your Inner European is French!

Smart and sophisticated.

You have the best of everything - at least, *you* think so.

Who's Your Inner European?

Paris, France. November 18

2007-11-24T18:15:00.000-05:00

Annoyances

2007-11-05T17:58:00.000-05:00

I am drinking a bottle of Douro red that I purchased in Portugal last month. It is quite pleasant: bigger and fruitier than is typical of French (and even Spanish) wines. It almost tastes like a New World wine. This is not uncommon for Portuguese wines. It only cost €4 or something like that in the airside duty free shop at Porto airport and for that price it is good value for money. But it is not very interesting: just a solid, decent quality wine.

What is of course annoying is that I am no longer permitted to take wine through security and then onto aircraft as hand luggage. I either have to put it into my checked luggage or simply buy it in airport shops after security. To put it in checked luggage I would have to pack it very carefully, and it is not worth the effort. And checked luggage is a hassle at the best of times. When traveling in Europe I generally don't bother with it at all. So if I take wine I just grab a couple of bottles in the airside duty free shop.

In Portugal, this is a great shame, because Portuguese wine has not been homogenised the way wine has in some other countries. The country is full of weird and wonderful wines that come from little villages that do things their own way. (Sometimes the resulting wines can be awful, but often they be good in very unique ways). You can buy the wine in the villages themselves, and you can buy it in little shops in the towns and cities. But not at the airport. Airport shops do blander wines.

Which is not to say that I am not enjoying what I am drinking now. I am, of course.

Matosinhos, Portugal. October 14

2007-10-21T18:22:00.000-04:00

Redirection

2007-10-16T16:52:00.001-04:00

If anyone has an interest in listening to Patrick Crozier, Brian Micklethwait, Antoine Clarke and myself talking about the Rugby Union world cup, a link to a podcast of our doing this can be found here.

Flying south for the sun

2007-10-14T08:35:00.001-04:00

I am in Porto, in Portugal. Yes, I come here a fair bit, which is simply because I like the place. It is particularly nice at this time of year. Yesterday there was fog at Stansted airport in London, which delayed my flight a few minutes. After that, we flew over cloud cover all the way south along the Atlantic coast of France, and across the Bay of Biscay. When we got to Galicia, though, we left the cloud behind, and it was beautiful weather. It has been lovely, sunny, blue sky weather in Porto all weekend. I think I might go to the beach.

However, first, an interesting story of globalisation.

When I first went to Hong Kong in 1987, and when I became fond of Dim Sum in Cantonese restaurants in general, I discovered that Dim Sum menus contain custard tarts just like that illustrated above. I found this a little odd: that kind of pastry is not a Chinese or Asian thing, and nor is custard. And although Hong Kong is English, they are not an English thing either. In my experience the Hong Kong chinese absolutely love their custard tarts, however. (There is particularly wonderful bakery in Kowloon City near the old Kai Tak airport that does superb tarts and is a Hong Kong institution, but they are made well throughout the city).

It wasn't of course until I got to Portugal and other Portuguese colonies like Mozambique that I figured out where this culinary delight came from. They are a Portuguese treat, and they are one of many fine things that you can buy in the Portuguese cake shops that exist throughout Portugal and the Portuguese speaking world. They got the Hong Kong from Portugual via Macau. Cool.

It is a shame, though, that the Portuguese did not send their coffee to the world in the same way. Portuguese coffee is superb. Chinese coffee, not so much. One can get Portuguese coffee in Mozambique, but it is not widespread. You can go to a lovely Portuguese style bakery in Mozambique and it will not have an expresso machine, whereas in Portugal such a thing is unthinkable. The reason for this is just that Mozambique is a poor country, of course. Espresso machines are expensive. As Mozambique gets richer, I am sure that things will improve in this regard. And at least they have the right coffee tradition to start with.

Update: It seems my theory is dubious. The egg tart that is so popular in Hong Kong appears to have evolved from English custard tarts directly, without necessarily receiving input from Portugal and Macau. On the other hand, Portuguese style tarts certainly are available in Macau and other parts of the far east.

The world is a remarkable place

2007-09-23T09:44:00.001-04:00

I am sitting at an outdoor table on a hotel balcony in Triesenberg in Liechtenstein, looking down on the Rhine river (not much of a river this far into the Alps, but it has still carved quite a decent valley) and drinking excellent Austrian beer. The haze in the photograph is actual haze. It is not caused by the camera. If there is no haze in the photograph, then that presumably means it is caused by the beer. Tomorrow morning at 9am I shall be back at my desk in an office at Canary Wharf in London. It does amaze me that I can spend weekends like this. Weekends away like this can also be astonishingly inexpensive, too, although Switzerland is a little more expensive than Spain or Portugal. I love being at work on a Monday, and in the middle of the afternoon unexpectedly putting a statement like "I was sitting beside the Rhine yesterday, and a strang thing happened....".

When I am in places away from home, from time to time I see temptation and want to succumb. I see a sign showing bus fares to Calcutta or ferries to St Petersberg and think "I could just buy a ticket and see where I go". Of course, I never actually do this. Today, the temptation was simply seeing a sign on a motorway, telling me that "München, D" was a mere 250km away. I have never been to Munich. I could have given Alan a call, and could have been buying him a beer a couple of hours later.

Of course, the minor problem with that plan is that I have to be at Zurich airport by 9.10pm at the very latest. While I probably could have bought Alan a drink in Munich and made it back to Zurich by 9.10pm, it would not have left much time for anything else other than driving. As it is, I think I will briefly visit Feldkirch in Austria (this is a rare chance to visit four countries in one day, and then drive to St Gallen to have dinner and visit the famous cathedral and then drive back to Zurich.

Riga, Latvia. September 17

2007-09-17T07:58:00.001-04:00

This, Mr Flintoff, is how it is done.

Riga, Latvia. September 17

2007-09-17T05:26:00.000-04:00