The good news: I was able to find an Indian cable TV channel that carries Formula 1 races live, so I’m able to watch the Hungarian Grand Prix live today.
The bad news: the channel is ESPN Star Sports, which has two of the most incompetent commentators I’ve ever heard. I think that the chief fool is a guy called Steve Slater, working with a straight man called Steve Dawson. Almost every technical observation that he makes – from the fuel rig problems to Adrian Sutil’s “shattered brake disc” – is simply silly.
Fortunately I’ve programmed my DVR to record the US broadcast, so when I get home I can listen to a competent team of commentators (especially the irrepressible David Hobbs).
And the race? Well, it was quite interesting until Hamilton’s left front tyre failed. (And the way Slater reacted to this event was monumentally clueless.) After that, the only question was whether Glock could hold off Raikkonen for third place.
And now Massa has just blown up! Slater’s asinine comment: “And now that podium will remain empty!” Sheesh! Anyone remember Colemanballs? And so Kovalainen gets his first win, while Glock nails P2 after Raikkonen backed off. Hamilton comes in 5th, and retains the championship lead by 5 points over Raikkonen; Massa drops to third.
UPDATE: The biggest upset from this race was in the Constructors Championship. Ferrari stay in the lead on 111 points, while McLaren jump to second with 100, leaving BMW in the dust.
Just got back from Mamallapuram
A bunch of Seattle Amazonians, including my boss Colin Bodell and yours truly, found ourselves in the Asiana Hotel in Chennai this weekend, and decided to play tourist. 
After several hours at “M’puram”, we headed back up the coast, but stopped for a quick visit to Crocodile Bank, a zoo and research centre devoted to all things crocodilian. From their website:
Starting with 30 mugger adults, the Bank has bred over 5000 and now holds over 2400 crocodilians of 14 different species. By 1987 the CrocBank developed a much broader focus, and became the Center for Herpetology, Indias premier institution for herpetofaunal conservation, research and education. Currently besides crocodilians, the Bank maintains 12 endangered species of turtles and tortoises, five species of snakes, including the King Cobra, Ophiophagus hannah, water monitor lizards, Varanus salvator salvator, two species of pythons and albino cobras. Housed in enclosures very similar to their natural habitat visitors can get a close view of how these reptiles live in the wild.
It’s awesome. Highly recommended.
The photos that I took are presently uploading (slowly – we’re up to number 28 out of 134 but they’re all up on grommit now) to my gallery. Enjoy.
9 hours 15 minutes, with no food
Amazon.com is becoming a large company, and I suppose that I shouldn’t be surprised that I met a colleague here in Chennai who had travelled out from Seattle on the same flights that I’d taken. What did surprise me was to learn that on the segment from Frankfurt to Chennai, the passengers in economy had no food whatsoever. I’d upgraded to business class, and I thought that it was disappointing that, because of the strike, we’d got a hot lunch but no other food except a bag of assorted snacks. I guess I didn’t know how lucky I was.
Nine hours, fifteen minutes without food. Longer, actually, because our take off was delayed while we received a fresh overflight clearance for Iraq and Iran. That’s ridiculous.
(Now I’m even more anxious about whether I’ll be able to upgrade my return flights on Wednesday. Right now I’m waitlisted…)
UPDATE: It looks as if the strike is over.
Apple or Adobe? Where to point the finger…
I’m visiting the Amazon Chennai office for a few days. Because of the strike at Lufthansa, I decided to travel with only carry-on bags, and to keep the weight down I brought my personal MacBook Air rather than my regular work MacBook. I figured that I only really needed something to take notes and log in to Outlook Web Access occasionally. ((If anyone from security is reading: yes, I do use FileVault.))
I was scheduled to give a talk this morning, and I’d prepared a slide deck, based on the material I delivered on my last visit to India. But yesterday after breakfast I reviewed the presentation and realized that it didn’t really hit the points that I wanted to emphasize. No problem: I settled down to put together a new set of slides. Since I don’t have Microsoft Office on my personal machine, I used Apple’s excellent Keynote. I cranked away, and by the end of the day I was happy with the new slides. I checked them again this morning, added a couple of slides, cleaned up my conclusion, and I was ready.
I walked into the room where I was giving my talk, and asked if I could double-check the compatibility of my MacBook Air with the projector they were using. “Oh, that would be awkward… could you just give me the slides on a thumb-drive, and I’ll copy them onto my (Windows) laptop?” So I fired up Keynote, saved the presentation as PDF, copied it onto a thumb-drive, and thought no more about it.
Soon it was time for me to give my talk. I located my slides, double-clicked the file, and Adobe Acrobat launched. (It seemed to be the first time, because I had to accept a couple of licenses.) I selected full-screen mode and started the presentation. We’d just got to slide 5 when Acrobat suddenly crashed, displaying a small dialog box that read “I/o error”. I tried again, without success. Several people huddled over the laptop, trying to be helpful, but after a couple of minutes I just grabbed my MacBook Air, plugged it in, and finished my talk.
People seemed to really like my presentation, but they were even more impressed that I’d managed to crash Acrobat…
Arrived in Chennai
Seattle-Frankfurt-MadrasChennai. Long. Delayed. But completed. I’ve checked in to my hotel (the Asiana), it’s 2:23AM local time, and I’m hitting the sack.
Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage, Sean Hannity: Accessories before the fact to murder
I was going to post my thoughts about the killings at the Tennessee Valley UUC, but
Terry put it better than I would have done.
Comparing cameras
I just uploaded a set of photographs to provide an apples-to-apples comparison between my three digital cameras: the Kodak P850, the Casio EX-S600, and the new Panasonic DMC-TZ4. All were taken from the same spot. I was concentrating on the zoom, but looking at the non-zoomed shots it’s clear that the Panasonic has a significantly wider field of view. (The Kodak and the Casio are pretty much the same in that area.)
I think that the Panasonic with its 8.1MP and 10x zoom is the ideal compromise. No, it won’t fit in a shirt pocket, but that’s about the only limitation. ((OK, I’d prefer a dockable design, like the Kodak and Casio, but I guess I’m in the minority.))
Uh-oh…
From the Herald Trib:
Lufthansa faces a major strike by ground crews and others starting Monday after the union said that its members voted overwhelmingly to support a mass walkout.
Guess which airline I’m flying on Tuesday. And “starting Monday” implies that it’s an open-ended action that may escalate.
Let’s see… I could go on ANA to Tokyo, then Cathay Pacific to Hong Kong and on to Chennai… Never mind: let’s see how things unfold over the weekend.
UPDATE: Well, the latest indications are that the strike isn’t affecting the long haul schedule at all. Right now it looks as if I’ll be good to go on my originally scheduled flights.
3G battery life
Since this has been a topic of some interest at work, I thought I’d let you know how the battery life on the iPhone 3G is going. I have three email accounts set up: my personal IMAP, a .Mac MobileMe account, and my Amazon.com Exchange account, which is syncing email, calendar, and contacts. I turned off Bluetooth and WiFi: I use a wired headset for both phone calls and music, and I find 3G is quite fast enough for data. I turned off “push” email, and instead opted for “pull every 15 minutes” on all three accounts. I used it in this configuration all day, making several phone calls, checking email and calendar every 45-90 minutes, and reading my RSS feeds through Google Reader while riding the shuttle bus between Amazon buildings. After work, I took an hour-long walk, listening to The Maria Dimension by the Legendary Pink Dots. After all this (about 13 hours), the battery was about 60% charged.
That works for me.
Gadgets
Gadget day here at Chez Geoff. First, I finally got my iPhone 3G this morning. After my frustrating wait in line a week or so ago, I spent an age on the phone with AT&T Customer Service to make sure that my account was unencumbered. All clear. Then last night I checked in at the iPhone availability page at Apple.com, and saw that the Bellevue was going to have inventory. According to the website, the store opened at 9:30, so I planned to arrive at 8:00. I did so, to find a dozen people in line ahead of me, and the store open for business! After an hour I reached the head of the line, got a 16GB white phone, and headed home. It took nearly half an hour to transfer the saved state of my old iPhone to the new one; while I was doing this, I was erasing all of the data on the old iPhone. (Apple finally realized that it was important to get this bit right: with the 2.0 software, erasing an 8GB iPhone takes over an hour! That’s thorough.)
Meanwhile, my new camera arrived. For the last couple of years I’ve used two cameras: a tiny Casio Exilim S600, and a bulky Kodak P850. Both are low-res by current standards (6MP and 5MP respectively), which is not necessarily a bad thing, and the Kodak does decent RAW and zooms to 12x. The trouble was the weight/bulk of the Kodak. Over the last two years I’ve relied almost exclusively on the Casio; yesterday I found myself literally “dusting off” the Kodak. And as a tourist camera, the Casio is far from ideal. Yes, it’s conveniently small, but the relatively narrow field and 3x zoom are really limiting. I think that my trip to Beijing was the final straw: I was continually frustrated while trying to capture the sweep and grandeur of the Forbidden City.
So yesterday I ordered myself a Panasonic DMC-TZ4 from Amazon, along with a spare battery and an 8GB(!) SD card. 8.1MP, 10x optical zoom, nice wide-angle Leica lens. It’s my seventh digital camera, and like all of them (except the Kodak) it cost under $300. Why not the DMC-TZ5? Partly to save a little money, and partly because I’m still not convinced that I need that many pixels. (The lower resolution means that I’ll get a couple of hundred more pictures on my SD card with the TZ4.)
Hopefully the weather in Chennai will give me the opportunity to put the camera through its paces.
UPDATE: Per dpreview, it appears that I need to update the firmware in my camera. Why am I not surprised?