Europeans?

One topic that is constantly in the news (at least in Cyprus) is that of European expansion - in particular the possibility of Turkey becoming the first Muslim country to join the European Union.

A lot of countries support this, but Angela Merkel and Nicolas Sarkosy, the leaders of Germany and France, aren't so keen. They feel that Turkey lies geographically outside of Europe.

Now, this isn't a political blog, so I'll make no comment about this particular issue. There are however other, wider, definitions of Europe. I'm thinking in particular about the European Broadcasting Union.

The EBU is an organisation that includes countries such as Egypt and Tunisia, that are of course part of North Africa. It's associate members even include Canada and the USA. In the old days, the EBU organised live events broadcast around the globe by new-fangled satellite technology. These satellites didn't do anything other than reflect the TV signals, a bit like having a large mirror in space, and so the quality was somewhat ropy, but the resulting blurry images were high tech in the 50s.

Sadly, associate members don't appear to be included in the annual Eurovision Song Contest. This is the most famous of the EBU's activities. EBU countries can each submit an entry, and each country shows the competition live on TV. Each country also votes for what it thinks is the best song, and the country that wins gets to host the next year's event.

Sweden's Entry in 1962:


A few years ago, that well known European country Israel won with a transvestite singer. Last year, the Russians won, and so this year's competition (the 54th) is being held in Moscow.

Traditionally the competition serves two purposes. First, it is used to showcase each country's worst singing talent - a bit like an international karaoke evening. Secondly, it promotes hostility and disunity through Europe, with countries giving more points to their friends, and "null points" to their enemies. Some people claim that Russia won last year because of all the former Soviet Union countries.

Sometimes, though, people don't play by the rules. In 1974 ABBA won the contest for Sweden and became internationally famous. This year Andrew Lloyd Webber has written the British entry. I can't comment on it, since I've not heard it.

What's really disappointing that the USA and Canada don't get to take part, and so the majority of readers of this blog won't be able to go through the same pain as the rest of us. I mean, you won't be able to enjoy the marvellous annual event that is the Eurovision Song Contest.

This contest starts tomorrow. It used to be only one night, but now it's three because there are so many countries involved that they have to have two nights of semi-finals. So that you don't feel completely left out, here are the entries for Cyprus and Greece. I think it's a bit sad that both entries are in English last year - at least the Cypriots had a Greek song in 2008.




Cyprus:







Greece:






Enjoy...

Downhill

I think my body clock's finally got back to normal. I woke up early this morning, and had a read through the paper. You now have to pay for a subscription to read the online version of To Vima. This is good, because paying around €1 a day is a real incentive for me to read it and get my money's worth.

Then I went into town. I had a few things to do. I had to get my hair (that's "hairs" to you, Dan) cut, and get a couple of other things dealt with. I ended up having a burger in Burger King at around 9.30am, and I picked up a games controller (for playing the racing game) for £5.

However, I'm starting to worry about my health. Not in relation to Pig Flu, since it's now 7 days since I was in Canada and I've not started walking on all fours oinking, but I think I might be going senile. This is especially worrying given how young I still am.


The car park I use in town is one of those where you get a ticket on the way in, then pay for it before you leave. For the second time in the last few weeks, I got to the exit ready to put my ticket in and realised I'd forgotten to pay. So I had to go back round the car park to get a space (somone had already nabbed my old one), before paying.

I've been using this car park since it was built around 20 years ago, and I've never forgotten to pay before. Once could be just one of those things, but twice? I think my brain cells are finally wasting away. Maybe I've got a slow form of mad cow's disease from all those burgers.

I finally left town and went to the supermarket. Needless to say I'd forgotten my green plastic bags. For the second time in a row. I was also feeling rather bloated after the Double Whopper Meal, so I didn't end up buying a great deal of food. I also couldn't remember what I'd run out of.

Then I got home, but instead of being good and writing a blog post, I had to make sure that the game controller thing worked. Which meant spending several hours playing, er, I mean testing it. Like crosswords and learning foreign languages, computer games are supposed to help keep your brain from rotting.

I just hope it's not too late...

Wordy Wednesday

Haters

One of the Greek linux bloggers mentioned the Unix Hater's Handbook the other day, and that it's available to download online, so of course I had to have a look. So far I've read the first few chapters. It is written in a humourous style, and some of it is rather dated. But the chapters do have titles such as "Unix. The World's First Computer Virus" and "Welcome, New User! Like Russian Roulette with Six Bullets Loaded". These guys really hate Unix.

They make the usual complaints - for example the fact that the delete command (rm) actually deletes files, even if you ask it to delete all of your files. Em, guys? this command is supposed to, em, delete things. Instead they think it should be far more complicated, so that it can try and second guess the user and protect you from yourself.

Sounds familiar? Yep, one of the authors worked for Microsoft. The people who brought us Windows, one of the least user friendly and most annoying systems ever. What's really funny is that a lot of this computer stuff is really quite simple, but Windows makes it really complicated, then designs an interface with 20 million menu options, 100 million annoying messages that pop up when you actually try and do anything, and then markets this as simple and easy to use.

Nowadays on Unix and linux people who don't want to risk destroying their entire filesystem with 8 keystrokes* have got graphical tools that are almost annoying as the Windows ones, so problem solved.

Naturally I was wondering about a Windows Hater's Handbook. But aside from the fact that the author of such a book might get sued to Kingdom Come, it'd have more volumes than the Encyclopaedia Britannica. It's also too easy a target.

Still, they reckon the Windows Tax is about £100 per computer - I'd be willing to pay Bill Gates £150 a machine NOT to put Windows on it...



*It's not that easy anyway - you have to be running as the Super User to really mess things up, and people won't usually be doing that.

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Body Clock

You may (or may not) have noticed that I wasn't around last week. I was on the other side of the Atlantic. The highlight of my week was trying out some Canadian cuisine.

I hadn't realised that there was such a thing as Canadian cuisine, but they do have a national dish, and amazingly it doesn't seem to contain Maple Syrup. It's called Poutine. The locals rave about this, so I had to go and try it at an establishment that is apparently famous for it's poutine. It was a fast food trailer. I started to wonder why, if it was so great, none of the nice restaurants had it on the menu. I didn't have to wonder for very long. Poutine is made with fries, lumps of cheese curd, and gravy. Like the donner kebab and the deep fried Mars Bar, the idea isn't to provide a balanced, nourishing meal, but it's rather a competition to make unhealthy and revolting menus that don't actually taste that bad. In the case of poutine, I really can't see what the fuss is about - it tasted pretty bland to me. Experts can tell how fresh the curds are by listening to the squeaking noise they make when you chew them.

I had it a couple of hours before getting onto a plane. Perhaps I should have warned the pilot about the extra weight, but we did still make it across the Atlantic.

[Source]

Since I've been back, I've not been getting hungry at dinner time. Either my body is still in the wrong timezone, it's still digesting that poutine...

The Story of Tracy, Louise and Bob - A modern fairytale

Once upon a time, in a far away land called West Virginia on a magic farm known as Rambling Acres lived Tracy. Mother of three, blogger, agony aunt. She watched bizarre adverts on TV at four in the morning so that no-one else had to.

Now, I know what you're thinking. She sounds just like your average fairy tale princess. However, she's not. She's special. No regular fairy tale character ever went around saying "gosh Dern".

Tracy had long flowing locks, ideal for allowing princes to climb to the top of high towers and rescue her. However, being a married princess (now you know where the three children fit in to the story), she decided to get her hair cut. (Feel free to gasp at this point in the narrative).

Meanwhile, in the 1920s, there lived a young woman much known in the land for her "raw sexuality". This fairy tale is PG rated, by the way, which means that parents may bring their children but might get asked embarrassing questions afterwards. Anyway, the young woman was called Louise.

Louise made a few films in the days before they had sound. The most famous of these is "Pandora's Box", in which she plays a high-class prostitute whose life goes steadily down-hill until she ends up as a dead low-class prostitute.

Louise also had short hair. It was in a style known as "Bob". I'm not sure if that's named after a gay hair stylist who first invented it, but let's say that it is, to give the children another embarrassing question to ask.

When people saw Louise's Bob, they were stunned by her good looks. And that "raw sexuality" thing. One blogger and Bob fan was even inspired to produce the Bob World Film Database, devoted to films of actresses with bobs.

When people saw Tracy's Bob they were also stunned by her good looks. And the butterfly. The land was filled with crys of "Great Bob!", and everyone said how hot Tracy looked (at least a 19-year old shop assistant did). However one blogger, called Brian, was a little uneasy. He was obviously bowled over by Tracy's amazing hairstyle, but he didn't really want to say that she reminded him of that nymphomaniac prostitute in Pandora's Box. Or that she looked like someone who was born in 1906. She might take it the wrong way and send her prince round.

Louise lived well into her 70s, though she didn't make many more films. Tracy contiues to delight her fans, and Bob is apparently alive and well, and turned 100 earlier this year. Which brings us, as in all good hairy tales, to a neat (rather than split) end.

Wordy Wednesday - Living in the Future

When I was young, maybe eleven (nearly 30 years ago!), I thought it would be really great to turn my bedroom into the control room of the TARDIS. Perhaps like this 10-year old.


I'm not quite sure why I wanted to do this, except I was a fan of the Doctor Who series. The room is dominated by the central controls, and there's a distinct lack of comfy furniture. I suppose since I would have spent a lot of my time playing with LEGO on the floor of my bedroom this didn't seem to be such a big problem.

By the time I was fourteen or fifteen, living abroad and having only watched the small number of episodes that friends had obtained on video tapes from the UK, I remember realising how childish the programme was.

As you might expect, some people have turned their houses into spaceships. These people are generally male and probably single. One of them has a website and is offering this as a service. He might be a great 24th Century interior designer, but he clearly doesn't know much about creating a useable website. Since it has apparently not been updated for a few years, I wonder whether he made a viable business out of this.

If asked whether I'd turn my flat into the Star Trek Bridge or the TARDIS, I would of course give the same answer as most other sane people. However, I did start wondering about different space-age places, and what it would be like to really live in them.

The TARDIS (Doctor who)

They didn't generally show many other rooms of this machine, but it was supposed to be infinitely large, so there might have been some nice bits to live in. However, the controls never really worked and the Doctor got lost more often than Bugs Bunny. And everywhere he went there were Daleks, or Cybermen, evil geniuses bent on world destruction, and so on. I don't really want to end up saving the world every time I go out to get a pint of milk, so I'd give this one a miss.

The U.S.S. Enterprise (Star Trek)

This doesn't strike me as a pleasant place to live. The beds look uncomfortable, and the decor is somewhat drab. It's full of contradictions. How come you can just talk to the ship's computer, and yet there are so many control panels all over the place?

Like the TARDIS, the Enterprise goes from one life-threatening situation to another, and the red alert siren would get a bit annoying after a while. Nevertheless, there are supposed to be children on board. I wonder why...

Professor Xavier's Institute (X Men)

Bits of this seem quite nice - the old-fashioned house and garden, but having mutants walking through your walls might be unnerving. People complain about living on aircraft flight paths, never mind having the X-Men jet taking off in your back yard...

Earth (Blade Runner)

People practically have whole apartment blocks to themselves, and there are loads of Chinese fast food places within walking distance. The reason so many places are unoccupied is that the aftermath of WWIII has left the planet irradiated, and most people have gone to live on Mars. Nevertheless, you always see crowds of people in the streets.

Whilst the idea of having all that living space seems great, everything is very dark and dreary, and all the people there are a bit unhinged. Otherwise they'd have gone to Mars too.

Earth (Buck Rogers)

New Chicago looks like a rather miserable place to live. Like so many futuristic places, this is very stark and bright. The brightness probably has something to do with energy-saving lightbulbs, although they never seem to turn lights off, and the lack of comfortable furniture may be due to the depletion of natural resources. Or it may just be that these programmes were low budget..

Serenity (Firefly)

If you haven't seen the Firefly series, or the film Serenity, then stop reading now and go and get the DVDs. The cancellation of the programmes after a small number of episodes was criminal. Although this ship is also always in danger, I'd actually quite fancy being on it. This is nothing to do with the fact that it has it's own resident prostitute, but it's a community made up of people with different skills and a sense of loyalty to one another. I've no idea what I'd be able to contribute, admittedly, but out of this rather random selection of options, it's the one I'd choose.

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Hello, this is Brian. I'm not at my computer right now (which is why I've not visited your blog this week), but if you'd like to leave a message after the tone, I'll get back to you in a few days. Beeeeeeep...

At the Mercy of the Bugs

The other day we learned about Bee's chigger infestation. Unfortunately, they don't actually feed on blood. They'll just eat her skin. I say unfortunately, because if they were blood sucking insects then she could have got rid of them by getting very drunk on tequilla - after all, remember what it does to those worms.


I'm lucky that I've rarely been bothered by bites. Either I dont' taste good, or my skin just doesn't react so I don't notice. I just get annoyed by moths and terrorised by spiders. Though so far this year, I've not had many eight-legged invaders in my flat.

If Bee survives the chiggers, and West-Nile-Virus-carrying mosquitos, she may or may not be comforted by the thought that some man-made bugs can be more dangerous. I'm referring to bugs in computer programs.

Now, most of these bugs just make your word processor do funny things, and providing you aren't using Windows in your nuclear submarine, the BSOD is unlikely to be a matter of life-or-death. But there are some computer bugs which really have killed.

I was reading about an infamous case of a computer controlled radiation therapy machine which actually fried a few people, zapping them with around 100 times the prescribed dose of radiation. Some of them didn't survive. Of course, the machine also successfully treated a far larger number of patients, and once they found out what was wrong they were able to add some safeguards which solved the problem. The bug in question was a "race condition" - something that depends on the timing of unconnected events, and which is very difficult to find.

That happened in the 80's, and since then engineers have developed a better understanding of the risks of using software in critical systems, such as for flying airplanes or driving cars, and ways to mitigate them.

Debugging the HAL 9000 - with a screwdriver

I'll be away from my blog for a few days, and more importantly that means I won't be commenting on any of yours, but there should be an automatically posted Wordy Wednesday. Bugs notwithstanding. And provided that the software controlling the various transportation I'll be using doesn't crash, I'll be back in about a week...

Wordy Wednesday Hits the Gas Pedal

When I chose my home computer two and a half years ago, I ignored all the advertised features except for two things - the amount of memory and the price. I wasn't buying a gaming machine, so the graphics card, processor power, etc, didn't matter. After all, I wasn't going to do much more than surf the web, right?

A few weeks ago I installed SuperTuxKart on my machine. This is a 3D racing game starring Tux (everyone's favourite penguin) and friends. The last racing game I played was Pole Position in the 80s, and clearly things have moved on a little. Instead of just having a rather flat track in front of you, you can drive all over the place (although you usually fall off something and have to be rescued if you stray too far), and there are different road surfaces, hills, and so on.

In addition to driving faster and better than your opponents, you can do things like firing rockets at them, or ram them off the road. It's all great fun, and now when Helena comes for the weekend she is eager to play it. Especially since she's now better at it than I am.


I'm sure, though, that to really appreciate it, you have to drive for real. Being able to cut corners, drive dangerously fast, ram other vehicles, and even better to fire rockets off must be every driver's fantasy, especially if no-one ever gets hurt.

A small number of people get closer to making this fantasy a reality. A few years ago the army sold off some of their old tanks, and they were bought by enthusiasts, at least one of whom was the subject of newspaper articles, as he drove to and from work in his. Unfortunately the military had deactivated the gun, but he still found other drivers were strangely reluctant to argue about who had priority at roundabouts.

My car is over six years old now, so I'm wondering whether I should trade it in for something a bit more warlike.

The main problem with a tank, other than finding a place to park (though they wouldn't be able to clamp you), is that it doesn't exactly get up to SuperTuxKart speeds. And I dont' expect they run to air conditioning or comfy seats, though you wouldn't need to worry about where to put your CD changer - you could probably fit a juke box in the thing. Whether or not you'd be able to hear it above the engines is another matter.

And what do you do about refuelling? I don't imagine you'd manage to get it anywhere near a forecourt petrol pump. The car wash would also be out of bouds, but I don't believe in washing cars. That's what rain's for.

Another option is a Harrier. It's vertical take off and landing means that you don't have to worry about replacing your driveway with a 3-mile runway, they boast an impressive range of weapons and a top speed of 700mph. Sadly, though, the air doesn't get very congested during rush hour, so there are very few other drivers to ram. In addition, I've just checked my driving licence, and although I'm legally able to drive a small road roller, there doesn't appear to be any mention of a Jump-Jet.


So it looks like I'll have to keep the Skoda for now. I was a little concerned with the lack of firepower, but last night I installed a newer version of SuperTuxKart on my machine. And stayed up till 2 in the morning playing it. They've replaced the missiles with exploding cakes. This is excellent news, since I'll be able to chuck those out of my car window. I'm just off to the bakers across the road to place an order...