Month: November 2005

Texhnolyze

On a previous visit to Colorado, I mentioned that one way I spent my evenings was to watch anime on DVD. One of the first series that I collected, serial experiments: Lain, is regarded by many as one of the finest works of its kind: exquisitely animated, with a compelling (and deeply disturbing) story. Some of the same team then produced Haibane Renmei, which situated the same kind of transcendent visuals and intense narrative in a magical world reminiscent of Miyazaki’s work.

On this trip, I’m finally venturing into the world of Texhnolyze.texhnolyze.jpg I actually bought the first two DVDs of this series more than a month ago, but I hesitated. Unlike the earlier works by this group, Texhnolyze is billed as being explicitly violent: set in “an experimental metropolis buried deep inside the Earth, ruled by gangs, where mayhem and retribution are a normal part of life.” Whew! And those that know me will confirm that I don’t tolerate violence. Indeed, I’ve walked out of films because the gratuitous violence made me feel sick.

This evening I watched the first 25 minute episode of Texhnolyze. Yes, there were three violent incidents, but the impression that I’m left with is of a chaotic kind of peace, not mayhem. It’s very reminiscent of Lain: you’re absolutely on your own, given no help in making sense of the world that you’re presented with, as lost and confused as the characters that emerge from the shadows. I’ve tried to ignore the back-story that was hinted at on the DVD case, and to simply let the film-makers tell their story. I think I’m hooked: theirs is a world worth exploring. More anon.

"The computers are down…."

I’m visiting Louisville and Broomfield in Colorado this week as part of the ongoing Sun+StorageTek integration work, and so I took the first flight from Boston to Denver this morning. I had a couple of surprises. First, I was upgraded to first class for some reason (something to do with rectifying another travel agency screwup). Then when I checked in my boarding card was marked “SSSSS“, which meant that I was pulled aside for the full search: bags, wanding, pat-down, even what the agent called “the TSA back-rub”. The wand was turned up so high that the zipper on my trousers set it off!

The flight was uneventful: I slept most of the way. However when I reached Denver, the Avis reservation computers were down, so they were processing every car rental booking by hand. Eventually I got to the front of the (long) line, was asked “Is a red Ford minivan OK?”, said yes, and was given a contract and a bay number. I walked out to that bay, and found a blue Chevy SUV. Different colour, different make, and – most important – different registration. I flagged down a passing Avis staff member, we hunted around a bit for the Ford, and then she gestured to the SUV and said, “Are you OK with this?” I shrugged, “Sure – it’s got four wheels and a tank of gas”, so she amended my contract with the relevant info. So now, for perhaps the first time, I’m driving an oversized SUV. It has the aerodynamics (and wind noise) of a brick, and the driving position is uncomfortably upright, but it works.

Mind you, having AWD may be useful. They’re forecasting 1-3 inches of snow this evening, with 25-40 mph winds….

The lunatics are running the asylum….

From The Inquirer: US grants patent for anti-gravity device:

“ACCUSATIONS that the US Patent office is giving out dotty patents were given some credence this week after the magazine Nature discovered that the watchdog had just granted one to a bloke who claimed to have invented an anti-gravity machine.

Boris Volfson, of Huntington, is the proud holder of patent 6,960,975, which is for a space vehicle propelled by a superconducting shield that alters the curvature of space-time outside the craft in a way that counteracts gravity.”

No word on whether it has to be constructed from transparent aluminum.

Essential reading on the Sony/BMG Rootkit fiasco

Here’s a detailed account of the incompetence of Sony/BMG and First 4 Internet, the cowboys who wrote the brain-dead rootkit masquerading as DRM (digital rights management). From Mark’s Sysinternals Blog, the bottom line: “Instead of admitting fault for installing a rootkit and installing it without proper disclosure, both Sony and First 4 Internet claim innocence. By not coming clean they are making clear to any potential customers that they are not only technically incompetent, but also dishonest.”

And yes, they try the same trick on Macs too. Scumbags!

Ask not for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for Tony

So Parliament has handed Tony Blair the black eye that he deserves. From the BBC: “Tony Blair has suffered his first defeat after MPs rejected his plan to allow police to detain terror suspects without charge for up to 90 days. MPs rejected the plans by a bigger than expected margin of 322 votes to 291, before later backing a 28 day limit. The defeat came despite Mr Blair saying MPs had a ‘duty’ to support the police. Tory leader Michael Howard said Mr Blair should resign after failing to ‘carry his party’ but Downing Street says it was not a confidence issue.”

As Enoch Powell famously observed, “All political careers end in failure.” Blair should recognize that this now applies to him. The old Blair would never have allowed himself to get into this situation; one has to wonder whether he actually wanted to be defeated.

Juxtaposition

On the one hand, a row of unsold gas-guzzling behemoths, from One Giant Metaphor, reporting on a “Hummer dealer… in a panic…. year-to-year sales down about 50%,”

Unsold Hummers

On the other hand, a photograph that I took in Hyderabad a couple of weeks ago, of a family of five on a motor scooter:

Hyderabad family on a motor scooter

[N.b. I’ve grabbed a copy of the Hummer pic because linking to the original was unreliable. Hope that’s OK.]

Wireless in India (and England)

One of the things that made my trip to India and England so successful was seamless wireless connectivity. I thought I’d go into some detail about this, because it might be useful for future travellers.

As I’ve described before, my phone is a Palm Treo 650 *, with service from Cingular. It’s a quad-band GSM phone, and supports GPRS (IP over PPP) Internet access. (This is critical: if you plan to travel to most parts of the world, you must get a GSM phone. It’s the standard; just get over it.) The Treo includes a basic but adequate email client called Versamail, which can handle POP, IMAP, and SMTP with and without SSL. This means that I can access both my Sun email (Edgemail via secure IMAP) and my personal ISP account (via POP). There’s also a web browser called Blazer which does a reasonable job of rendering complex web sites on the 320×320 screen. And since it’s a PalmOS device it also supports a wide range of applications; the one that I used most often was World Clock, without which it would have been really hard to keep track of the 101/2 hour time difference between Boston and Bangalore. (I also installed Bejeweled 2 as a superior time-waster to solitaire.)

As I noted earlier, I called Cingular to enable international roaming before leaving the US. Everywhere I went – in India and in the UK – I established a usable roaming connection when I turned on the phone. However the automatic choice was not always the best one. Several of the providers didn’t support GPRS (or didn’t allow GPRS roaming), which meant that I couldn’t get my email. After manually selecting each of the available providers, I eventually determined that the best choices were Airtel in India and Orange in the UK.

Looking back on this trip, I cannot emphasize too strongly how important it was to have a working cellphone (with web and email) while travelling in India. It’s not cheap, but roaming calls back to the US and UK were certainly less expensive than hotel phone rates. The normal way of getting around in India is to book a driver and car for the day; your driver will expect you to contact him by cell phone whenever you need him. When the power goes out (rarely, but inevitably), or when that WiFi hotspot turns out to require the use of a prepaid coupon that can only be purchased somewhere else, you can still use email. And most important, the successful resolution of my Mumbai connection situation depended heavily on the use of voice, email, and web; first in Bangalore airport, then on the shuttle bus to Mumbai’s international terminal, and finally as I stalked the corridors of Mumbai airport at 3am.

One final thought. I packed my iSight camera in the hope of using iChatAV to videoconference with friends and family rather than using the phone. Well, it didn’t work out. The main reason was that most of the hotels used firewalls that blocked several of the TCP ports needed by iChatAV. Maybe a simple VoIP system would have been better….

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*One point worth noting is that the Treo 650 includes a camera, albeit a fairly basic one. Photography is forbidden in many places in India, and you will frequently be required to check any cameras or camera-equipped phones. If I were buying now, I’d be tempted by the Siemens SX66, which doesn’t have a camera but does include WiFi – and it’s only 2.1 ounces!

Ashes 2005 – the DVD

When I was in England last week, the most prominent DVD displayed in the shops wasn’t a blockbuster film, or a music video: it was the three DVD set covering this summer’s Ashes – the cricket series between England and Australia.DVD cover However it bore the dreaded Region 2+4 logo, meaning that it wouldn’t play on US DVD players. (Yes, I know I could unlock mine, but I’d prefer not to have to.) So I was delighted to find that a company called Dreamcricket is about to start shipping the US (NTSC) version. Warne, Flintoff, Vaughan… and Richie Benaud’s farewell. I can hardly wait!

Day 18 – the end of the trip

I just got home from Boston’s Logan airport after my flight from London. This morning my mother and I went in to Oxford to buy a few small items that, curiously, it is almost impossible to find in the USA:

  • Soluble paracetamol (acetaminophen) and aspirin. Quicker acting than tablets or caplets, and much more convenient for those who have trouble swallowing tablets, or for oral pain. In the UK you can also get over-the-counter soluble paracetamol with codeine (500mg paracetamol with about 8-10mg. codeine), which would probably require a prescription in the US – if you could find it.

  • Blu-Tack – a simple way of sticking papers, postcards, etc. to vertical surfaces. Comes in a slab; you tear off what you need and squash it into shape.

  • Small cash-ruled notebooks – Merry uses them for various purposes, we always get them from W. H. Smiths.

  • Wrights Coal Tar Soap.soap Sounds ghastly, doesn’t it? Actually it’s my favourite soap, and a British tradition for 145 years.

We also met my brother for coffee in Blackwell’s. It’s convenient to the Bodleian, where he works, but it has one unavoidable drawback: I cannot enter the shop without buying a book. Today I got away relatively cheaply, picking up philosophy books on Jerry Fodor, the Churchlands, and Indian philosophy.

As for the flight, I’d prefer to forget it. The seat recline mechanism was broken in our row (no, there wasn’t an emergency exit behind us), and when the three people in front of us all reclined their seats fully, we were trapped. I had the window seat, and the tall guy in the middle next to me had nowhere to put his legs. (I prefer the Airbus A330/A340 with 2-4-2 seating.) In spite of this, I actually got some sleep, using my iPod and Bose noise-cancelling headphones. The trick is to listen to music that is fairly repetitive but not too quiet: I used a playlist containing two albums by Ray Lynch followed by five or six CDs worth of No-Man. That worked.

And now I have to face my case full of dirty laundry. Perhaps tomorrow….