Michael Jennings

Apology

I appear to be having a few problems with blogger at the moment. There appears to be a substantial delay before new posts and changes to old posts are actually visible on the website. Therefore please bear with me if I do not appear to be posting new stuff and/or stuff which obviously neads correcting remains current on the blog. I am working on it.

Redirection: I have a piece on how the names of the various divisions and leagues in English football are getting even sillier.

I've noticed this too

In this hugely entertaining piece in which he laments the decline of pubs as venues for the men of Middle England to enjoy themselves, Digby Anderson does indeed identify one of the key problems of English pubs today.

Yes, there are indeed far too many people consuming silly drinks out of pink bottles. Beer (either real ale or imported from Belgium, Germany or the Czech republic), fine wine, and single malt whisky are acceptable alcoholic drinks. Everything else is for wimps. Silly drinks in pink bottles are beneath contempt.

Wednesday evening song lyrics (even though it is Thursday and I haven't done any song lyrics for three weeks).

It felt like spring time on this February morning
In the courtyard birds were singing your praise
I'm still recalling things you said to make me feel
Alright I carried them with me today now

As I lay me down to sleep
This I pray
That you will hold me dear
Though I'm far away
I'll whisper your name
Into the sky
And I will wake up happy

I wonder why
I feel so high though I am not above the sorrow
Heavy hearted 'till you call my name
And it sounds like church bells or the whistle of a train
On a summer evening I'll run to meet you barefoot
Barely breathing

As I lay me down to sleep
This I pray
That you will hold me dear
Though I'm far away
I'll whisper your name
Into the sky
And I will wake up happy (oh darling)

As I lay me down to sleep
This I pray
That you will hold me dear
Though I'm far away
I'll whisper your name
Into the sky
And I will wake up happy

It's not too near for me
Like a flower I need the rain
Though it's not clear to me
Every season has its change
And I will see you
When the sun comes out again

As I lay me down to sleep
This I pray
That you will hold me dear
Though I'm far away
I'll whisper your name
Into the sky
And I will wake up happy (oh oh...)

As I lay me down to sleep
This I pray
That you will hold me dear
Though I'm far away
I'll whisper your name
Into the sky
And I will wake up happy

I wonder why (hmmm)
When the sun comes out again
When the sun comes out again
When the sun comes out again
When the sun comes out again (oooh)
When the sun comes out again
When the sun comes out again (hmmm)
(comes out comes out oooh)
And I will wake up happy
So I pray

-- As I Lay Me Down, from Sophie B Hawkins' 1994 Album Whaler.

Don't do it Cecile

Take it from me, you really don't want to pretend to be an adult Canadian.

A development.

Something I have seen in a few music shops lately is combined packages consisting of the DVD of a movie and the soundtrack CD in one box (and for one price).

This is quite an interesting development. Traditionally, music companies have fleeced people who like to buy soundtrack CDs even more than they have fleeced people who like to buy other CDs. Soundtracks were seen as a specialist taste, and we were (and to some extent are) still being charged as much as 15ドル for soundtracks, while the cost of most other CDs plunged downwards through the 10ドル mark some time ago and is still dropping.

The logic behind this is impeccable. Obviously the people most likely to buy a CD soundtrack are the same people who are most likely to buy the DVD of the same movie. And the DVD market has been growing so fast that it makes sense for the rapidly declining music industry to attempt to bolster its own revenues by latching on to this. But they can only be making a couple of pounds per CD, which is a bit of a come down.

And of course, one reason some people like soundtracks is that many of them are a sort of mix tape: an opportunity for the film-makers to devise a set of songs that naturally fit, possibly for unexpected reasons. For a time, they were about the only kind of officially sanctioned mix tape in existence. These days of course they are not: producing your own mix CDs or your own playlist on your MP3 player has been a growth industry for the last few years, and programs like iTunes have made it easier than ever. And now you can of course buy lots of other people's playlists through the iTunes Music Store and similar.

I have no idea whether these appeal to film soundtrack afficonados, bus I suspect that they might.

Redirection: I have a piece on Wimbledon (mainly about Tim Henman and Roger Federer) over at ubersportingpundit.

Leben Sie transparent...

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Whenever things look bad, one can reassure oneself by acknowledging that things were once much worse.

(Link via Blognor Regis).

Redirection

I have a piece on England's loss to Australia in rugby on Saturday, a discussion about how England's recent performanes compare with other World Cup winners in various sports, and thoughts about what this means.

Redirection: I have a brief piece on Greece's European Championship victory over France over at ubersportingpundit.

Update: I also have a piece on the schedule for next year's Australia v England cricket series, also at ubersportingpundit.

Overreach

As happens these days, my laptop computer has been getting steadily clogged up with programs generating popup ads, spyware, and all kinds of other crap over the six months that I have had it. (I have been fortunate enough or well enough defended that I have avoided getting any worms and viruses). I have largely just put up with this. However, a week or two ago, one of the programs that has been showing me popup ads decided to start showing occasional pictures that were essentially hard core pornography, in the hope that I would click on the link and buy more hard core pornography.

This was enough for me, and I have gone through a thorough spyware and irritate-ware removal process, something I should have done a while back. Spybot Search and Destroy informed me that there were over 120 separate pieces of anti-social software of one kind or another installed on my system. Ugh.

Well, they are now gone.

Although I have not myself had a worm or virus infection, several people I know have, and I have been helping out in cleaning these up. One friend of mine received an infection from a variant of the Gabot worm, and this managed to mess things up pretty thoroughly before we managed to kill it.

Update: That wretched porn came back. Either the both Spybot S&D and Ad-aware both missed it, or I visited the site that was responsible for installing it in the first place again and it got reinstalled. (And no, I didn't attempt to rip the new Beastie Boys CD). Now running the software again, but I am very pissed off. I might be about to abandon Internet Explorer and start using Firefox exclusively, too.

Doing a little hacking

Okay, I am in the process of installing Wine on my Linux box. This is a reverse engineered implementation of the Windows APIs that runs under Linux and other Unix like systems that run on x386 processors, and theoretically allows them to run Windows applications. Ideally I would like to use it to run iTunes under Linux. There isn't really anything else in terms of Windows applications that I feel I have to have. Firefox is a substantially better browser than is Internet Explorer, and while I haven't used it in a big way, OpenOffice seems adequate for most of my purposes. And while there is an open source jukebox program that was part of the SuSE Linux distribution, I really do want iTunes.

Redirection

I have a quote of the day over at Samizdata.

Non updated websites

A reader has gently chided me and asked whether I am a "slow reader", due to the fact that (he claims) I have had the same three books listed in the "What I'm reading" section in the sidebar on the left for the entire time he has been reading the blog.

That is not entirely true. Over the 18 months or so the list has been there, quite a lot of books have appeared and then vanished. These are some of the books that I have actually read in that time. (I do read a substantial number of books). However, there is something of a problem. When I started the list I had eight to ten books sitting on a table next to my bed, and these were the ones I put on the initial list. I had at least started all of them - in some cases just having read a page or two. Since then, most of the books on the original list have vanished as I have read them, but the remaining three have stubbornly refused to be read. Mostly this is just that I haven't got round to reading them, but they haven't really grabbed me either. "Gangs of New York" seems quite good, and I will no doubt get to it at some point. "Tea From an Empty Cup" is by Pat Cadigan, and Cadigan writes intense and dense books that require a lot of concentration. To be properly appreciated her books need to be read within one sitting or within a couple of days at the most, and I haven't really managed to sit down for such a sitting. "The Seduction of Place" is the one really problematical one. It's a book about architecture containing lots of interesting information about how certain cities got the way they are, but it is rather tiresomely ideological, and ideology in urban development and urban design usually leads to bad places. (It is also a rather rare thing - a book I read because it had a really good title - summarising the buzz I get out of seeing and visiting new places - something I practically find necessary for survival).

Some would suggest that I should remove the books from the list if I have gone so long without finishing them, but that would be an admission of defeat somehow: an acknowledgement that I never will read them. And I think somehow that I should read them. The longer they stay up the more I feel so.

The trouble with this though is that the list then doesn't summarise my taste in books very well. Stuff I find hard going stays up, and stuff that I enjoy and read in one sitting stays up for a much shorter time, if it even gets up at all. (Also, there is a feeling that if I put a book on the list I have an obligation to then read it quickly, and that is perhaps not fun). In recent months I have been reading books, but I have not updated the list.

So the overall rule is the more I enjoy a book the shorter the time it spends on the list. Oops.

Perhaps it is the way the list is structured: I update the blogger template. This takes longer than just making a blog post, and doesn't keep a proper historical record.
Or perhaps I have just grown lazy.

But I am not going to delete the feature for now. I think I will try to update the list properly, and I may make a rule that all books stay up for at least a week, even if I have already finished reading them by the time I put them up. In fact I think I shall put up some more books that I am either reading or I have just read right now.

Or I could switch to actually writing reviews of the books I read. But that sounds like work.

But the three books are staying up until I have actually read them.

Redirection

I have a 6000 word essay that is basically a history of the Australian airline industry for the last 50 years over at Transport Blog.

Gmail

Google are now giving me another set of invites within a few hours every time I use up the previous set. Presumably the exchange tradeable value of a gmail account is now crashing.

Developments in the English language

I am working on my laptop computer. It is sitting on my desk. When I use it, it usually is sitting on a desk somewhere. Laps are only used very occasionally. Sometimes when I am using it in bed I sit it on my chest, but I don't think anyone has ever invented the word "chesttop". "Notebook" computer is a reasonably okay word, denoting the shape but not how it is used, but laptop is still dominant.

On the other hand, the ATX midi-tower seems to have won the war to become the standard form factor for desktop PCs. However, this normally sits on the floor beside the desk, so it is more a floortop computer than a desktop computer. Of course, the "entertainment" PC: something connected to a flat screen and sound system, used to watch television and DVDs and to listen to music and based on a small form facter flex-ATX or mini-ITX motherboard, and which possibly fits in an entertainment cabinet - is clearly on the rise. Whether this is a new type of "desktop" computer that also doesn't sit on a desk, or whether this will be considered to be a third common class of PC, after desktops and laptops remains to be seen. (In fact, if I were to get into the PC making business full time, I think it would be wise to concentrate on this type of machine. The big consumer electronics manufacturers and retailers don't seem to have figured this all out yet, and only a portion of the home brew PC makers have figured it out either. There is I think quite a bit of demand in this market, and there is much less competition than there is for building midi-ATX towers).

So there we have it. Laptops sit on desks. Desktops sit on floors.

An ambition

Someday, I too want to be inducted into the Robot Hall of Fame.

(And of course the lack of R. Daneel Olivaw amongst the inductees is a scandal. But I digress).

The modern world, and bad things about Dell

Yesterday evening, I was lying in bed. My laptop was plugged into a power outlet, but there were no other wires connecting it to the outside world. (I could have course have been running it off batteries). I had a hands free headset plugged into the laptop, and I was having a conversation with somebody in Adelaide. I was simultaneously operating my brother's computer (in Cessnock north of Sydney) remotely, to remove some of the foibles of Outlook Express Service pack 1 which were annoying him. At the same time the person in Adelaide who I was having the voice conversation was having an instant messaging session with somebody in South Carolina (or was it North Carolina?) who was giving him some cooking instructions for the dinner he was simultaneously making.

As a down point for Dell, their present model desktops have front headphone sockets and front USB ports, but no front microphone sockets. Given that more and more people are using things like Skype for over the internet audio communications, this is becoming more of a design issue. It's not so bad if you connect a microphone permanently to your computer, but if you use a wired hands free headset then you have to reach around the back to plug it in. This is a nuisance. (Of course the other option is to install Bluetooth and to get a wireless hands free headset).

Good things about Dell

When I purchased my laptop computer about six months ago, I ordered it from Dell's UK website. I decided that I wanted a good sized hard drive (by laptop standards anyway) and I therefore clicked on the "60GB" option. There was also an 80GB option, but the standard option was less than that - I think there were 30GB and 40GB options as well. (80GB is still the maximum for my model, although there are hard to find 100GB drives on some other models). I do not recall if the speed of the drive was specified on the online order form, but if it was I did not pay attemtion. Most laptop drives are 5400rpm (or sometimes 4500rpm) and I guess I just assumed that it would be one of these (and to be truthful I didn't think of the issue at all).

In any event, when I recently took the drive out of the computer so that I could put the drive from my old laptop in to test if it still worked, I noticed that the drive was a Hitachi 7K60. This runs at 7200rpm and is generally considered to be the best laptop drive available in terms of performance. Dell supplied me with a really top notch component there, for which I thank them.

They didn't draw my attention to this in any way though. Perhaps they have a mixture of suppliers and not everybody got a drive this good. Or perhaps they wanted people to pay extra for an 80GB drive, and didn't want to draw attention to the fact that the 80GB drives they were offering were actually lower performance than the 60GB drives. (There are no 2.5" 80GV drives that I know of that run faster than 5400rpm).

And why do hard drive speeds always seem to come in multiples of 900rpm. (This is the same as saying multiples of 15Hz, which is perhaps a slightly rounder number).

Update: Of course, many of them actually come at 4200rpm, which is not a multiple of 900. Me stupid.