As I queued at the supermarket checkout this evening the podcast I was listening finished and I began playing some
music. I started with Nena's 1983 and 1984 hit, 99 Red Balloons. As I waited for the checkout I noticed - again - the worry the song discusses.
It's a 1980s Cold War era song about the definite possibility that there would be a nuclear war. I suppose the Germans were especially scared as they hosted short range nuclear weapons that were intended for use within (the other bit of) Germany. And it all ends so sadly:Panic bells, it's red alert.
There's something here from somewhere else.
The war machine springs to life.
Opens up one eager eye.
Focusing it on the sky.
Where 99 red balloons go by.
It's all over and I'm standing pretty.
In this dust that was a city.
And it was so different today in the rather nice supermarket. The country may be about to split into two, leaving a rump Brussels to... well I'm not sure what it would do. But it doesn't compare to worrying about some buggy software triggering our mutually assured destruction. So I had some vegetables, bread and a bottle of wine in my basket while
I expect we're not really worried about a death raining down on us from Russian ICBMs we're worried about Chinese and Indian carbon warming us up. Well I'm sure that the vegetables and vodka in our baskets acted as carbon sinks. We're doing our bit for the planet. At least I think we are.
We got an integrated e-mail and calendaring system at work, last week: Exchange. I suppose it does what it needs to for corporate communications. But with Exchange comes Entourage: Microsoft's interface for Mac OS. Unfortunately, Entourage 2004 looks like a refugee from the East German 1976 Summer Olympics team. It didn't run like them, though. It ran like a one-legged man in a treacle factory.
And this was my good fortune, it led to me getting one of our few copies of Office 2008, which is treacle free. But what's really good about it isn't that it's faster than Office 2004. The best thing about is that it looks good. It's clearly had some very serious hard work on the user interface and a beautiful visual overhaul.
Part of that overhaul is a new font in Word: Cambria. It's a lovely looking font that's very easy to read on a screen and makes writing so much nicer. I have a lot of writing to do in the next few weeks and I think this will help make it that little bit easier.
Grrrrr.
So now I'm leaving it clears up for a few hours. Last night there was a great sunset and some dry weather. Today should be dry and sunny all day, but I'll be leaving mid-afternoon. Maybe I'll have better luck at NANOG next month.
Every time I visit this country another layer of rose tint is removed from my spectacles. This time it's weather.
I got up at 4.30, this morning and left for work at about 5.30. The hotel I'm staying in is further away than before and the walk takes about half an hour. That's fine. I like walking.
As I left my room and walked to the exit, I noticed that the paths between the buildings were wet and thought that it was very sensible to turn on the sprinklers late at night, rather than run them during daylight hours. By the time I'd walked 150 yards I realised that the sprinklers hadn't been running because there was a thin drizzle. It had got quite a bit heavier before I'd walked a quarter of a mile.
Shortly afterwards I saw a large pool of water in the gutter at the side of the road. I had the great fortune to be walking past it at the same time as a huge 4x4 ploughed through it and soaked my right side. And then I carried on walking the rest of the way. I was thoroughly wet by the time I walked into the office.
It turns out that I spent 22 hours traveling, yesterday and I brought northern Europe's penetrating drizzle with me. And it looks like it's staying for the rest of the week.
I'm sitting here working on some statistics and not enjoying the sound of the laser printer, outside. So I created a playlist of all the unplayed tracks in my MP3 library and found a Woody Allen CD in there that I haven't listened to since I copied everything over from the laptop with the 'just about to break' hard disk.
Woody is a genius. The way he tells his stories is as important as the stories he tells, but in among the brilliant stories in his stand up routines are some fantastic jokes. This must be one of the best jokes ever told:
I was in NYU, my freshman year I cheated on my Metaphysics final. I looked within the soul of the boy sitting next to me.
It's a perfect joke. It's a shame Woody doesn't do stand-up any more.
Lifehacker featured a great little tip, yesterday. It's a Greasemonkey script for integrating Gmail, Google Calendar and the chat widget all on the same page. I often find I flick backwards and forwards between Gmail and the calendar, so sticking them all on one page is very convenient. It's just a shame that Google don't offer this themselves as I expect the script will break at some point and leave things disintegrated (?) until an update is released.
Earlier today, this story popped up in my feed reader and when I read it I couldn't concentrate on the text for a bit because of the picture that accompanied it. I couldn't make my mind up as to whether it had been edited by the BBC or not. I'm still not sure, although Emma tells me she's pretty sure the lipstick was photoshopped. What do you think?
How far from your last home do you live? Why did you move and are you glad you did?
Submitted by Matthew 25.
I now live in Brussels which is about about 209km (~130m) south of Amsterdam. It's about two hours by car or three hours by train. Taking the train lets you watch movies and read books, though, so I think that's the winner.
I lived in Amsterdam for about seven years but moved in August last year. I moved for a bunch of administrative reasons associated with my job but I don't regret the change as Amsterdam is still close by and I get to see more people at work now.
We use only the finest baby frogs, dew picked and flown from Iraq, cleansed in finest quality spring water, lightly killed, and then sealed in a succulent Swiss quintuple smooth treble cream milk chocolate envelope and lovingly frosted with glucose.
You know the sketch. It's the one with the Whizzo Quality Assortment and the completely mad descriptions of the Crunchy Frogs, Cockroach Cluster, Anthrax Ripple and so on inside it. Douglas Adams used the same phrase in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy when Zaphod exclaimed that "they might just let us off with being lightly killed".
I suppose it's a meiosis and I must admit that I love this particular figure of speech. Meiosis has almost become a marketing rule and so I suppose I shouldn't laugh when I see phrases like "gently pasteurized" on the orange juice carton I bought earlier today. But I find it fairly amusing as pasteurisation must heat the liquid being pasteurised to the required temperature or it isn't pasteurisation.
The Dutch phrase implies that the method used was UHT, so the juice was probably heated to 138°C (250°F). And even if it only reached that temperature for less than a second I don't think you can really call the process "gentle".
Nonetheless it tastes good and I can recommend Sensora to anyone who wants a litre of orange juice.
Show us your biggest dream.
I'd love to be able to spend a weekend away in orbit around Jupiter. I've always thought it's an absolutely gorgeous planet and with it's moons and (faint) rings it would make a great location for a bit of sightseeing.
