jcm's blog

Addendum: I’ve changed “UK” to “England” in two places here, because commentors are right that I’m talking about the England entry into the World Cup. My points however were more generic than simply the England football team.

I’m not finally decided on my views on this year’s World Cup. I think my views on football (soccer) itself are pretty clear – that in the UK it’s largely polluted by a contingent of troublemakers who travel around and give this country the bad name that it’s earned around the world as a result (actually in very specific parts of Europe where these people go for their troublemaking). It’s a game that fuels the supermarket tabloids and generally doesn’t do it for me at all. However, I’m in two minds about the cup. Here’s the conflicting thought process:

• Part of me would love for the England team to lose as quickly as possible. This would reduce the number of nutticisms going on all around me, calm the flag waving nuts just a little and bring back some variety to TV programming over the coming weeks. But it probably would do nothing to stop endless debate about small bones in the human foot.
• Part of me would love for the England team to go all the way and win. This would keep football supporters occupied elsewhere and reduce the chances that I’ll see so many going on drunken binge trips to mainland Europe on the weekend. Winning this time around would remove the interest in football during the 1960s and perhaps bring a sense of reality to many people.

If only people were as interested in world politics as they are in the tiny bones in some pointless footballer’s pointless foot. Just think what would happen if “The Sun”, “The Daily Sport” or one of these other disturbingly pointless newspapers would devote some time to serious issues on that backpage real estate. Just think what would happen if Sky weren’t so sexist in their advertising (“here’s the crap that’s left while the boys are out watching the football” – see their advertisements for more examples). Oh, what a place the UK could be without the “footie”.

There. I dislike football. But you knew that already.

Jon.

I spent the weekend in Prague, hanging out with some friends from work. This was my first visit to the Czech Republic and I was very impressed – certainly, Prague is very different from what I had expected in my slightly naive post-cold war vision of parts of Eastern Europe. In fact, it was a very cool weekend indeed.

I arrived on Saturday morning on the 06:35 KLM flight out of London into Amsterdam and then caught a (09:something) connection out to Prague with CSA (Czech Airlines). I didn’t bother with sleep on Friday but just ran on coffee instead – got more work done too. We spent the day on Saturday wondering around the town, occasionally stopping for food. During the course of the day, we climbed a tower in one of the old churches (hundreds of steps, no handrail, traffic in both directions) and got an excellent view of the city. We had food in a nice little restaurant for around $10 and took an elevator to the top of the TV tower (ugly building, but the tallest in town and you can’t see it from inside itself) for a night time view.

After an excellent night’s sleep in a nice little hotel near downtown, we headed out for breakfast (eggs, coffee, fat and greese on a plate just like I wanted) and then took a tour of the Jewish Ghetto area of town with a tour guide who turns out to be studying Jewish immigration into the US in history. I don’t know a lot about the Jewish faith beyond what I’ve briefly read, so I enjoyed donning a kippa and wondering around various museums and even a cemetary. Most shocking of all was seeing the lists of the many thousands who were murdered by Nazis painted onto the walls of one of the museums we went to. They’d repainted the walls following the flooding in 2002 which had basically destroyed the innards of buildings in parts of the old city – they now have portable flood barriers that can be mounted in re-inforced mountings fixed into the ground throughout town.

I’ll upload photos from my cellphone camera later (I left my digital camera at home) but suffice it to say that there’s a lot to look at in Prague. It’s a cool place and I look forward to visiting my friends there again, perhaps over the summer.

My usual Heathrow rant

When I arrived at Heathrow for my outbound flight, I was again asked to go through a millimeter wavescanner device (imaging systems that store “naked” images of you for indeterminate periods of time in giant government databases you have no access to – that’s what I’m opposed to, the lack of regulation of these hysterical “teworwists are everywhere” people, not very short term image scanning per se.). I again refused, since I’m a British citizen, was in the UK, and they can’t legally force me to go through one of those (yet). This time, I was very firm and quite vocal in front of other passengers (but civil and complicent with legal requirements) and immediately showed them membership cards from several human rights organisations. This time, I wasn’t given a degrading experience. So, that’s how to handle them.

Heathrow was as annoying as usual on the return with the typical delays I have come to expect going from one terminal to another to finally reach a bus that would take me home. At the bus station, the lines were again confusing and I decided to explain this to one of the staff but alas, my words fell on deaf ears. Apparently, the only people who use this bus are regular passengers, so it’s entirely ok to have missleading signage that’s confusing to visitors – despite the fact that I witnessed a bunch of people getting confused first hand. Typically British.

Jon.

So George Bush says that Gay Marriage undermines families and that decisions about whether to allow it should be in the hands of the people. There’s just one tiny little problem with that… If you want to let people decide whether they’re happy with gay marriage, then, just allow it. Those who want to get married can do so and those who don’t can go give a surmon about it instead. People who live in the stone age and dislike allowing others to do what they want with their own lives might want to consider a career in a totalitarian regime – there are positions opening up all the time in the Middle East these days.

Jon.

So I went along to the Arrogant Worms concert in Southampton last night. It was a real blast – fun music, cool crowd. I sat on a table with a bunch of cool cats from the Isle of Wight who are almost as into the band as I am. We knew the lyrics to every track (which I think surprised the band, despite an apparent fantastic reception elsewhere in the UK) and the others had even brought a tub of vaseline with them – there’s a silly song about Celine Dion that has a line about it, was funny when they actually did sing that song. The band took my request to sing the Last Saskatchewan Pirate and finished up with that, after being asked for the usual encore.

I stayed in a Premier Travel Inn. Typical mediocrely-bad British hotel experience – disgustingly bad breakfast (that they charge you 7GBP for – worse than the Westernized breakfasts I had in Mumbai) comprised from stoggy mushrooms, baked beans and almost-reasonable egg, with yesterday’s croissants and finished up with reheated coffee.

Jon.

Those who read this blog from time to time will have noticed that I’ve been in Switzerland a couple of times recently, hooking up with Sven and some other Linux friends. Last weekend, in Zurich, we went to a cool concert and hung out – and met up with ajh, and Leslie. Last weekend, we said it’d be cool to do something random in Amsterdam this weekend, so we did. I hooked up with Sven and Leslie on Saturday and we hung out for a couple of days. As you know, I’m a big fan of coffee so the plentiful range of coffeshops was more than a little convenient. I like Amsterdam for a whole load of reasons.

So I got back to Heathrow and had the usual unpleasantries getting to Reading. They love to screw you over as much as they can. The bus I had booked for didn’t turn up, so while I was waiting for another one I got chance to witness a quaintism in action. Bus turns up bound for Woking, driver gets off, people start to get on. This driver has no change, but rather than work around the problem, he whines and goes into verbose mode, telling them how unsurmountable the change situation is and probably causing people more frustration than they’ve had anywhere else on their thousands of miles getting to London. Seriously. Anywhere else, you’d just get on the damn bus and they’d take credit cards, give change, and just keep things running nicely. Oh, and not time all the buses to arrive simultaneously from one central bottleneck. Contrast the experience between Heathrow buses and any US airport bus service and you’ll see what I mean. Cheaper too.

Places featuring on my European TODO for the next month or so:

• Prague
• Dublin
• Belfast

Picked up a copy of Building Embedded Linux Systems to go through with a marker, looking for bits and pieces in the text – need to get onto that. Got a bit of writing done last week – this week I’m going to get the kernel intro chapter finished and mailed off too, with a vengence. I’ve realized that I can get a lot more writing done when I’m in a certain kind of mood – one that the music I’m listening to right now really helps with. Damn I need more time, tea and coffee, and exercise. I need to get a driver’s license, I need a bunch of things.

I finally got a copy of the new Pet Shop Boys album in the mail today, the one with Integral on it (Also in this delivery was a book about Rosa Parks). Integral is a song about ID cards. It features such great lyrics as “If you’ve done nothing wrong you’ve got nothing to fear, if you’ve something to hide you shouldn’t even be here” and “Everyone has their own number in the system that we operate under, we’re moving to a situation where your lives exist as information”. It’s primarily written (and in my case, listened to) in recognition of the completely fucked up UK government. But I hope the US likes it too – man, that NSA scandal is getting to be a TIA farce. At least Condi got the right treatment at Boston College yesterday.

One of the professors at Boston College resigned over Condi getting that honorary degree (what was the degree for anyway? best invasion thesis of the decade?). He was interviewed on Fox last night (I watched it – I find Fox hillarious, it’s so “fair and balanced” they had to build new special Fox scales just to measure it…) and all the interviewer wanted to know was whether the guy voted for the Democrats or not. In the US, being a liberal minded Democrat is commonly used against you, because the media often don’t have anything better to say. The guy being interviewed refused to answer the question and said “you want to brand me a leftie” and other great stuff. He was cool – he told them where to shove it and even managed to get in a few criticisms of Fox before they cut him off.

This weekend, the Arrogant Worms are performing in Southampton. They’re a cool Canadian band that I got introduced to last year. I mailed them to say they should do a UK tour – and I doubt that made them do it, but it’s cool that they are doing one. If anyone is interested in checking out some cool Canadian music in the UK this weekend, drop me a line!

Jon.

Photo: SWISS plane in Zurich. Their pilots evidently train at the same school of power diving that Air Berlin pilots go to.

I spent the weekend in Switzerland, again. My friend told me he’d be in the country once more and asked if I felt like doing something – of course I said yes. We went to see a concert on Friday night, then crashed with my friend’s cousin in Zurich before heading out to Geneva on Saturday to hook up with Andrew. I crashed in Geneva on Saturday and returned to the UK on Sunday afternoon. A fun weekend filled with travel from one side of the country to the other (twice, by rail) and fun with great friends.

We joked that we’d have to do it again this coming week. So we are. Except, this time we’re meeting up in Amsterdam over the weekend.

Jon.