Are We Gluing Coffee Pots? - and Lots of Randomness

My latest parcel of purchases from Greece arrived the other day. This consisted of:

Detective Novels - Two novels by Giannis Maris. He was Greece's answer to Agatha Christie, writing stories prolifically in the 50's, 60's and 70's. His detective is Captain Bekas.

An Audiobook - I've never ever listened to an audiobook, so this is an experiment. The book itself is apparently a classic of early 20th Century Greek literature.

An old Dictionary - This was published in 1969, and is a dictionary of the old formal Greek that was abolished in the 1970s. It might be useful for reading older non-fiction works, though to be honest I mainly got it because I like dictionaries.

The Greeklish Dictionary - This isn't actually a dictionary, but a rather strange book consisting of modern idiomatic Greek phrases literally translated into English. I managed to find some of them (including "Are we gluing coffee pots?") in dictionaries, though you really need to come across them in actual use to understand them properly. Others, such as "Shit high and gaze", I have no idea about.

License

I was up until 4am last night (or should I say this morning?). Not because I was busy looking up strange Greek phrases, but because I had discovered a random web site. Appropriately named random.org, it is a site that provides randomness. It's run by a computer scientist at Dublin University, and it's the ideal place to go if you want to roll dice, toss coins, pick cards, generate lottery tickets, or run prize draws or electronic gambling (depending on which authority regulates your business).

It all started in 1997, when Mads Haar connected a $10 radio to an old Sun computer and started playing static through it. The radio was deliberately not tuned to any station and had to be cheap because the more expensive models tend to filter out the static. Contrary to what Windows users might believe, computers aren't very good at being random, since they're designed to behave in a predictable manner. If you want your computer to run games where real money is involved (or strip poker), then the last thing you want is any kind of predictability.

These days, he's got six radios and much more powerful servers, and is able to generate the equivalent of 18,000 coin tosses a second. If you go onto his site, you get a million bits free, and a daily top-up of 200,000 bits (up to the million bit limit).

I got the site to shuffle a pack of cards for me. This used up 335 bits. Of course, I then had to do some calculations to work out the least number of bits you need to do such a shuffle. Wouldn't you? I came up with 226, and then spent more time when I should have been sleeping trying to work out what they're doing that uses 335. Actually, if you keep shuffling it uses different amounts - other shuffles produced 322 and 401.

It's only now that I've written all this down that I realise two things. One is how sad all of this makes me sound, and the other is why the reality of computer shuffling might not work like the theory. At which point I'll have to leave this fascinating tale. I've got a card shuffling program to write.

"We'll say them", as they say in Greek...

Chrome Surfers, Blue Teeth, and Document M of the Building Regulations

I don't know if any of you remember Mosaic. It was one of the first browsers, back in the days when the web was just starting. In the days when men were men and wrote web pages in raw html. Before applets, javascript and flash. People didn't used to say "the web", but "Mosaic", as in "I've put my home page up on Mosaic".

What things were like before Mosaic

Things have come along way since those pioneering days, less than twenty years ago. Mosaic was superceded by Netscape, and then by Firefox, which introduced us to the joys of tabbed browsing now copied by all of its competitors. And even though much of the web's content is still the same, i.e. text-based, it is surrounded by flashing whizzy graphics.

And things are getting flashier and whizzier. Over the last year or so, my favourite news websites have gone from simple, fast-loading pages to Flash City, with tickertape and ever more annoying adverts. It got to the stage where I was finding it tedious to use them because Firefox would take forever to render them, especially if I opened multiple tabs.

I decided it was time to try something different, so I downloaded google's Chrome browser. The difference was instantly noticeable. The same webpages now load much faster, and the browser rarely hangs. Chrome doesn't have as many features as Firefox, which is a good thing. The problem with software is that it gets more and more clunky and difficult to use as they add more and more features. Chrome is much newer, and so hasn't got to that stage. Yet.

I've only been using it for a few days, but so far it seems to work fine. It even has a porn mode, for anonymous browsing. I've not tried it, but I'm told that people who are married find it useful. For buying that surprise birthday present, obviously.

Now the web is back to being almost as fast as it was back in the old Mosaic days.

Still on the subject of new technology, I took Helena to get a bluetooth USB adapter the other day. She wanted to transfer photos from her mobile phone to her laptop. Argos were selling them at half-price, i.e. under a fiver, so we got one and tried it on my Ubuntu netbook.

Like the web, wireless communications have also come a long way since the first Marconi wireless networks.

Nowadays they can get all this on a USB stick.

As far as I'm concerned, bluetooth is Voodoo black-magic, but Helena knew what to do, and we managed to get a photo off my phone and onto the computer. "Now disable bluetooth on your phone, before anyone tries to get into it.", she advised. I was impressed by her security-conciousness. Apparently the children all use bluetooth to transfer pictures and music in the playground. And for malicious purposes too, it seems.

This is the photo. It was taken on a recent visit to a local restaurant.

Notice the position of the hedge

We were sitting outside, and Helena suddenly looked over at the carpark. "That's awful!", she exclaimed. I turned round and looked at the two disabled parking spaces. "There should be enough space for the driver's door to open fully. How else will someone in a wheelchair get out? That goes against Document M of the building regulations."

I've checked, and sure enough, Part M of the UK Building regulations states that there should be 200m of hatched out space on the driver's side of every disabled parking space. As well as 200m at the back. It's amazing what useless information gets into children's heads. She's not interested in a lot of the more "academic" school subjects like science or maths, which has led me to question how she plans to earn enough money to look after her dad in his old age. How much do building inspectors earn, I wonder?

Hypertension

The Story So Far...

During a routine medical check, they discovered that my blood pressure was too high. I pointed out that to the nurses they shouldn't have been squeezing my veins so hard with that thing they wrap round your arm and pump full of air, but they weren't convinced. They extracted some blood, which you might have thought would help ease the pressure, but it didn't do any good. Eventually they decided I should see a doctor.

---

At the Doctors


Doctor: Says nothing, but looks expectantly at his patient.

BOV: They say I've got to see you about my high blood pressure.

Doctor: checking his patient's blood pressure: Hmmm. 160/88.

BOV: Waits.

Doctor: Yes. Yes. Well, that is rather high. Why is that?

BOV: You're the doctor.

Doctor: Yes. Yes. Hmmm. It was okay in 1998.

BOV: They say that I'm drinking too much and that I'm not getting enough exercise.

Doctor: What do you drink?

BOV: Alcohol.

Doctor: No, I mean, beer?

BOV: Beer, wine whisky, anything really.

Doctor: Anything you can get your hands on?

BOV: No, I didn't mean... I'm not an alcoholic.

Doctor: Hmm.

BOV: Look. I'm worried that I'm on the verge of death. I'm sure I'm about to have a heart attack.

Doctor: Yes. Yes. I can see that you are.

BOV: Clutches his chest and stops breathing.

Doctor: I mean, I can see that you're worried. You needn't be, you know. Clicks on the computer. Your risk profile isn't that high. Though they're underestimating your blood pressure. Clicks again. Is there any history of heart disease in your family?

BOV: They all died of heart attacks in their 50s.

Doctor: Oh dear. Yes, that's not good. It raises your risk by 50%. Clicks again. Yes. Yes. Here, you see? You've got about a 15% chance of having a heart attack in the next ten years.

BOV: 15 Percent??? That's the same as a turn of Russian roulette!


Doctor: I'm not sure what a bullet in your brain does to your risk profile. Clicks. Well, cut down on your drinking and come back in three months. If it's still too high we'll give you a pill.

---

So, I've swapped the demon drink for sparkling water laced with lemon juice. My body is responding to the lack of alcohol by making my sleep patterns even worse than usual. However, I'm still alive, which is something, and instead of worrying about my heart I'm now trying to find out what an overdose of citric acid does to you.

21 Years Later

The other day, I finished reading "The Man Who Watched the Trains Go Past", by Georges Simenon, put it in it's proper place on my bookshelf (next to "The Yellow Dog" by the same author), and checked my store of unread volumes to decide what to tackle next.

Eventually I chose "The Dam", by Spiros Plaskovitis.


It's a novel that was written in 1961, and is about a dam. I don't really know any more than that. So far, we've been introduced to the dam, and to the workers who take care of it. Funny things are happening, but because they're outside their routine, they just ignore them. Until an engineer turns up unannounced and asks them where the cracks are. Cracks? What cracks?

No doubt things will either become clearer or more obscure - I've no idea what kind of novel it is, though I suspect it's not something I would have normally bought.

On the first page, there is an inscription with my name and a date. And a price (£9).


When I was younger, I used to write my name, place and the date in every book I bought. Since I don't keep diaries and can't remember much that happened to me longer ago than a few days, these inscriptions are pretty much all that remain of my younger self. When my father died, I was reading Anthony Trollope's "The Way We Live Now", and I wrote the date at the top of the page that I was on.

I've long since given up defacing my books in this manner, and of course nowadays I have a blog to record anything interesting that happens in my madcap life.

Anyway, back to "The Dam". From what little I remember, I was staying in London for a week with a group of students, and we went on various day trips by coach. One of these was to Cambridge.

Of course, I made a point of visiting the Mathematical Bridge.

Picture: Chris Millar. License

And being a University town, they had a large academic bookshop. As the 19-year-old me was intending to get down to some serious work learning Modern Greek in the near future (I'd only been putting it off for about 4 or 5 years at that point), I found the bookshop's small Greek section and picked a book. I'm not sure why I chose that particular one. Obviously not for its exciting cover. I do remember that I had to look up the title in a dictionary once I got home.

And now, 21 years later, the time has finally come. I've read ten pages so far, which is nine-and-a-half more than I've managed before. If I'd known then that it would take me this long, maybe I'd have saved my £9. After all, that was probably a lot of money at the time - it would have bought at least 6 pints (less than 3 today). Or maybe I'd have bought it and filled that front page with notes about my visit to Cambridge. So that instead of one solitary memory about a bridge, I'd have at least another blog post's worth. The problem with young people is that they just don't think ahead.

Flying the Flag

England really isn't a bad place to live, most of the time. It's generally safe, and the locals are reasonably friendly. However, every four years the locals get very excited about something called The World Cup. Britain is probably the only country in the world without a national football team. Instead most parts of Britain have their own international teams. The largest of these is of course England. At World Cup time English flags appear everywhere. Every other car is emblazoned with them, people have their hair dyed with flags on them.


I'm almost tempted to scrap my old TV and buy an HD flat screen, because they're being sold at reduced prices almost everywhere, so that England fans can watch their team lose in high resolution. The local pub drastically reduces prices of their pints during England games, which isn't ideal. You have to drink your cheap pint surrounded by normally rational people who have somehow turned into rabid animals. Who shout and scream when their team gets within 10 feet of the ball, and who look like they're ready to commit murder when the other lot score.

I'm not sure why the English are always so hopeful. They keep banging on about how they won the cup in 1966. If I was an England fan, I wouldn't want to draw attention to the fact that my team hasn't won bugger all for 44 years. A few weeks ago they were even beaten by Woody Harrelson. Not the best of omens.



I'm thinking of suggesting to the landlord that he reduces the pints during the games that no-one wants to watch - after all, that's when he needs the business.

There was such a game yesterday afternoon. It was a sunny day without a cloud in the sky. I was sitting outside having a leisurely lunch and a few pints, and reading a Simenon novel. There were only a few of the die-hard locals inside, half-watching the match. It was Greece v. Nigeria.

Now, I'm not a football fan. Nevertheless, I did watch the start, with the national anthems, and I might have wandered inside every so often, usually when there was a lot of cheering on the TV. And I caught the last 5 minutes. I didn't cheer, but I was happy to see that a country with 150 million people to choose 11 players from was beaten 2-1 by the Greeks, who are only 6% of the size. The Greeks who are currently suffering all manner of crap due to economic woes, who now have something to cheer them up.


Which is great. And now, since I've had enough exposure to football to last me the next four years, and I'm also a little sunburnt, I think I'll cut down on my visits to the pub for the next month or so, and keep my head down until it's all over.

Something in the Water

Picture by Roger McLassus [License]

Today I finally got round to registering at a new doctor's surgery. It's only taken me 6 years. On the two or three near-death incidents that I've had since then, I've had to drive 8 miles to the old place, whereas this one is 2 minute's walk away from my flat.

There was a form, of course, and in addition they wanted some proof of identity. Photographic ID to prove who I was, and some proof of my address. The only photographic ID I've got is my passport, so I took that. As far as proving where I lived, they wanted what is becoming the standard these days.

In this digital, security conscious age where credit cards and passports contain smart chips, holograms and so on, this proof is none other than the super-secure "recent utility bill". Because it's not like any 10 year old with a word processor could possibly forge one of those. Oh, no.

As I was tearing the flat apart hunting for bills, I was almost tempted to see just how good my all-singing-all-dancing-printer-scanner is. All my bills are paid automatically by Direct Debit, so when letters from the electricity or water people come, I tend to chuck them on a pile. Sadly, there's more than one pile. And every time I need to find something, the piles get disturbed so that the most recent items are not always on the top.

I managed to find a lot from 2008. This was obviously a good year for bills, or maybe I just opened more of them. Then I found one from May 2010, but it was an electricity bill. The problem there is that they always address them to the letting agent rather than me. Even though they have no difficulty taking the money out of my bank account. So I needed a water bill.

Since these bills are apparently all the identity theives need, it was reassuring to know that if they broke in, they'd never find one recent enough. Or perhaps they'd already done that and taken all of the 2010 ones?

Finally, the last envelope on the last pile had a suitably recent letter. I'm not sure what they would have done at the health centre if I couldn't find it. I would have had to explain about my piles, and they would have said that if I had piles I should see a doctor, but not until I'd registered.

As part of the registration process, they get a nurse to examine you. This is normal practice, but I'm scared in case they find something terminal. They also gave me a small container which they want me to fill. "It's only to dip." said the receptionist. I'm not sure what that means - once the water has left my body, I don't really care what they do with it, though I'd advise them to stick to humous or taramasalata.

I suppose this means that I can't go to the pub tomorrow evening (the examination is on Thursday). Though if I did it would save a lot of hassle, as I might as well just fill the container with neat cider, and cut out the middle man (and my digestive system). Alternatively, I could use tap water. I'm tempted to do that and see what they diagnose.

Ideal Home?

Reading through my favourite blogs, there seems to be a recurring theme for many of you. Homes. Bee's taken in another family member, Chris is swithering about whether or not to move out of his unique Manchester home (apparently instead of being timber framed it's made out of CD cases), and SHG is in the process of moving Cowbell HQ to a new location. Kat and her husband are still busy doing out what is to be their dream home, and VE has an exclusive report suggesting that the President of some former British colony (I forget which) is considering painting his house a less boring colour. I think he needs a few tins of that Tartan paint.


So I thought that as a service to my readers, I'd try and find this week's must have property.

I spent hours scouring the world for that ideal but unique home. Well, I would have spent hours, or even weeks if it weren't for those nice folks at google. Anyway, if anyone has a drum can you please roll it for...

The Nuclear Bunker



There are apparently loads of these for sale in the USA. In addition to the rather modest property featured in the video, someone has done some extensive renovation of a missile silo in New York State. Two private suites in a spring-loaded structure designed to withstand a direct nuclear strike would be ideal when those troublesome or quarrelsome relatives decide to pay a visit.

These underground structures stay at a constant temperature all year round, which is ideal for wine buffs, and no doubt saves on heating and cooling. And you won't have to worry about dry rot, termites, ex wives, burglars or Word War III.

There's loads of space, plenty of scope for DIY, and the best thing of all is having something like "Atlas F Missile Silo" as the first line of your address.

I must admit that although at first I thought this was all a bit silly, the idea of living in such a place is quite appealing. However, I've decided not to move just yet. Apart from the rather long commute to work (even if some of these places do have their own runways), there don't appear to be many pubs nearby.

How did on Earth did they expect to keep civilisation going in these bunkers without decent boozers???