You may have noticed that my post about Czech cheese and wine just got truncated. What happened was that I decided to edit it slightly from the Blazer web browser on my Treo 650. It turns out that this browser has a limit on the size of a text field that it can handle, and rather than warning the user it silently truncates the data. This is clearly unacceptable, and if anyone from Palm is reading this….!
(Is there a better browser available for the Treo?)
One last post from Prague
A little more food p0rn….
This evening I decided to dine once again at the CD Club in the Diplomat Hotel. The waiter had a little trouble with my accent, and to accompany the “roast knee of lamb” he brought me a bottle of wine rather than a glass. Oh well… I decided not to send it back. It was a local non-vintage: a Frankovka red (labelled “modry sklep”, whatever that means). Very tasty. When the lamb arrived, it turned out to be what in America is called “braised lamb shank”, albeit a little drier than usual. Pleasant, but not distinguished. I finished it, and still had all this wine. What was I to do? The cheese plate beckoned.
An interlude: back in the 1990s I used to visit Grenoble regularly – perhaps 3 times a year – and I always stayed in the Park Hotel. They had a tiny restaurant that was notable for two things:
- If you ordered a half bottle of wine (and they stocked some interesting vintages in half bottles), they would give you “the other half” as a gift when you left
- they had the most extraordinary cheese board
Frequently I caught myself hurrying through dinner because I was impatient to inspect the cheeses!
Back to CD Club. The cheese plate arrived, and there were four extremely fine cheeses, none of which I could identify. There were two large wedges of a blue, some segments from a small chevre, a…
I grabbed a passing waiter (the same one that had mistaken my wine order) and asked him if he could identify the cheeses. He muttered something blasphemous like “Edam” and scurried off.
But wait: my favourite maitre d’ was suddenly to hand. I thrust a pen and paper towards him and asked him to write down the names of the cheeeses. He was delighted to oblige. The chevre style was Hermelin, the blue was Niva, the strong (?goat’s-milk) one with an orange rind was Tvarusek, and the semi-soft wedge was Blatackeslato (which is “very difficult for you to write” as he explained).
And with wonderf
UPDATED: For your enjoyment:
An unspeakable choice: rape, or death from dehydration
From Suburban Guerrilla
Last week, Col. Janis Karpinski told a panel of judges at the Commission of Inquiry for Crimes against Humanity Committed by the Bush Administration in New York that several women had died of dehydration because they refused to drink liquids late in the day. They were afraid of being assaulted or even raped by male soldiers if they had to use the women’s latrine after dark.
Just to be clear, we’re talking about women in the US Army choosing to risk death to avoid being assaulted or raped by their brothers-in-arms. Somehow I missed this aspect of the Army’s guiding ethos.
Wrapping up in Prague
I’m just wrapping up here at the Sun Prague office, after a full day of meetings. Most of them were on technical or business topics, but Roumen (or Roman) scheduled a session with a number of the bloggers here in Prague. (I didn’t get everyone’s name: please leave a comment if you were there, and I’ll add you to my blogroll.)
In a few minutes I’ll don sweatshirt and jacket (it’s warmed up a bit, but it’s still -4C), walk down the hill to my hotel, have dinner, pack, and hit the sack. I’m booked on a 6:50 AM LH A320 to Frankfurt tomorrow, connecting with an LH 747-400 to Denver. If all goes well, I’ll be arriving there at 3:25 PM. And the temperature is forecast to be 12C, which will make a nice change. I hope I can sleep on the flight, since I’ve got a dinner engagement in Louisville tomorrow evening!
And thanks to all who took the time to meet with me here in Prague. (And also to those I met in Bangalore, Hyderabad, and Pune.) I’m looking forward to our next face-to-face discussions, hopefully in the summer.
Free speech in Britain
Here’s a stirring piece by Polly Toynbee in the Guardian about today’s Commons’ debate on the Religious Hatred bill. Money quote:
Free speech is fragile: laws change cultural climates in the media and inside minds. Police who can, absurdly, question Sir Iqbal Sacranie for his homophobic views yet never arrest him for his inflammatory remarks over Salman Rushdie, will make no sense of this law. Police stations will be besieged by insulted zealots brandishing ancient books. Only the attorney general can agree an actual prosecution. Refusing will add offence to the already offended.
It’s an absurd bill, a bad bill, a deeply illiberal bill. Hopefully MPs will boot it out.
Update: The MPs did the right thing by endorsing the Lords’ amendments – and curiously, when the time came for the decisive vote, Tony Blair was nowhere to be found!!
Photos from Sunday in Prague
I’ve posted most of my photos from Sunday in my gallery. It took long enough to upload them; I haven’t done anything about captions yet. (Nor have I edited out the less successful images!)
Enjoy.
At the Prague office
Monday was a very full day of meetings at the Prague office. I began by walking the 10 minutes from the hotel to the office, thinking “Oh good – this is going to be convenient!”, and then getting a presentation from the site director on how they’re about to start moving everyone to a new – much larger – facility! Next time I visit, I’ll have to learn a new pattern.
Next I met with some of the managers at the site, which really brought home to me the growing diversity of our operations in Prague. This isn’t just NetBeans any more. After lunch, I addressed an all-hands meeting. As in Hyderabad, I finished with Q&A, and initially no-one spoke. After I’d worked the crowd for a while, someone piped up hesitantly, and within a few minutes we were discussing some interesting topics. I wish I knew the trick to short-circuiting that initial silent period, if there is one.
Because it’s not as if this group is shy. After the all-hands I had four more meetings with various groups and individuals, and then I went out to dinner with a bunch of the participants in the SEED program. On each occasion, everyone was talkative, forthright, and not afraid of controversial topics. I had a really great time. At the restaurant/bar, the beer was first-rate, and to ensure we had our priorities straight the entire ceiling was covered in bottles, as shown here….
So here I am at the office. It’s 7:53am on Tuesday morning: the security guard looked surprised to see me, and I doubt that anyone else is in the office yet. I expect that many people here start late and end late, to maximize overlap with colleagues in the USA. Never mind: it’s a good opportunity to catch up with my email (127 unread) and blog, before my meetings begin.
A survivor of 7/7 blogs
A long and thoughtful piece by Rachel from north London, a survivor of the 7/7 bombings in London. The bottom line:
To understand the roots of terrorism is the only way to defeat it.
169 photos
169 photos. That’s how many shots I took while exploring the heart of Prague today. Now I just have to upload them to my gallery – but I think I’ll wait until I have a better Internet connection available. There’s clearly something wrong when the front page of my blog (~400K including images) takes just 45 seconds to load on my cellphone and a whopping 3 minutes 40 seconds to load on my laptop connected via the so-called “high speed Internet access” here at the hotel.
High points:
- Crossing the Carluv most (Charles Bridge; note that I’m not going to attempt to include any of the Czech accents) in a freezing fog that made the cobblestones slippery but didn’t discourage hundreds of tourists and souvenir sellers
- The first souvenir shop on the east side of the bridge, where I bought a hooded sweatshirt (without which I wouldn’t have been able to keep going), and chatted with the staff for a while about Sun and the merits of different Linux distros
- Staromestske namesti, the Old Town Square. Simply stunning.
- An enormous cappucino at the Ebel coffee shop in Ungelt (the name means “no money”, intended to dissuade looters!)
- Josefov, the former Jewish ghetto
- Vaclavske namesti, a.k.a. Wenceslas Square , where I explored several bookshops as well as the local Marks & Spencer(!)
- Sunday brunch at the Restaurace “Sarah Bernhardt” in the Hotel Paris
After brunch I headed back to the Old Town Square and then across the Charles Bridge, intending to explore Prazsky hrad (Prague Castle) and the Hradcany district. But as I reached the Malostranske namesti, I suddenly realized that I’d reached my limit (in terms of energy and temperature), so I walked back to the Malostranska metro station and caught a train the two stops back to my hotel. A thoroughly satisfying 6 hours (and it felt longer, which I think is good).
Speculative thought of the day….
From my colleague, Jeff Kesselman:
And remember… only Nixon could go to China and only Sharon could pull out of the west bank. Perhaps, for the same reasons, only Hamas can bring peace to the Palestinians.