One second: $56

This morning was unexpectedly expensive. The ticketAt 7:15, I was walking to a downtown restaurant for a breakfast meeting, as I do every Thursday, and I came to the intersection of Seneca Street and 3rd Avenue. The light was against us, and so I waited with half a dozen other pedestrians for it to change. I was watching the traffic light for Seneca Street, which was devoid of cars. The light changed from green to yellow, and I put my right foot on the crosswalk. One second later, four things happened:

  1. the traffic light change to red,
  2. the pedestrian signal changed to “WALK”,
  3. I pushed off from the kerb with my left foot, and
  4. I heard the sound of a Harley Davidson revving; this was closely followed by a police siren.

I had been nicked for jaywalking.
I was quiet and scrupulously polite, remembering the case of Professor Fernandez-Armesto in Atlanta. I showed my ID, answered the officer’s questions, and received a citation ((Confusingly for non-Americans, “citation” has several contradictory meanings. It can, inter alia, mean “a mention of a praiseworthy act or achievement” or “a legal summons”. It ranks with one of my other favourite auto-antonyms, the verb “to table”.)) for $56. I have no idea how he arrived at that fine ((Merry thinks that the cop simply used my age.)) – the Seattle City code simply states that the fine shall be “not more than $250” (whew!). I also think that it’s odd that the fine should be nearly twice that for parking in a handicapped-only space, but then I come from a country, England, in which there is no such thing as jaywalking, and from a city (Boston) where the jaywalking laws have apparently not been enforced since 1976.
I guess I’m a real Seattlite now.

Some (non-luggage) thoughts on last weekend

It was a good weekend. On Saturday, I visited Lorna in hospital, then headed off to spend a few hours shopping in Oxford. As I was leaving the hospital, I checked my cell-phone, and saw that I’d missed a call from a UK number. I called back, and found that it was from Jeff Lower. Jeff and I had both attended Essex University in the early 1970s, and had subsequently worked together at a small software startup. We drifted apart after I moved to the States in 1981, and we hadn’t seen each other since about 1985. We recently re-established contact through LinkedIn.
Jeff lives near Newbury, about half an hour south of Oxford, and I drove down to visit for a few hours. It was delightful: Jeff has an idyllic house in the country, and we talked had lunch, listened to music, talked some more… After 22 years I really didn’t think that either of us had changed very much.
About four o’clock I returned to the hospital, and soon afterwards Alec and Adriana arrived. After visiting with Lorna for a while, the three of us took a bus into Oxford and went to Brown’s for dinner. It was, of course, a geek affair: Alec whipped out his Nokia 800 tablet in order to demonstrate the folding BlueTooth keyboard that he uses. I had ordered a Nokia 770 from W00t while I was in Dublin (just $130!), and Alec knew that it was waiting for me in Seattle. Over dinner (and later, waiting for the bus), we had a fine debate about the relevance of classical economic theories to information economies, governed as they are by network effects and the natural monopolies that flow from software platforms and wired infrastructure. It was good to see how complete Alec’s recovery has been – it was exactly a year since his accident in France – and it was great to finally meet Adriana. I’m looking forward to our next dinner.
On Sunday I flew back on a British Airways 747 that has been refitted with the very latest in-flight entertainment system, complete with video-on-demand for all. Once the cabin service director had rebooted the system(!), it was quite impressive. I watched two films: Jim Carrey in The Number 23, and the very funny Hot Fuzz.
One other thought: I spent a little while standing by the aft door as we were crossing Greenland, and I was startled to see so much bare rock, and so many meltwater lakes. The last time I’d crossed this area in summer (about ten years ago), it was pretty much solid ice from coast to coast. Not now.

Still waiting…

From BBC NEWS

Heathrow Airport is still trying to clear a backlog of thousands of bags following last week’s terror alerts.
Despite extra staff being brought in, the system is “under considerable strain”, with about 23,000 bags handled a day, British Airways (BA) said…
BA said could be days before the owners were reunited with their baggage.

Indeed. 36 hours after I landed at Seattle, minus my bag, the WorldTracer system reports that it is still being traced:
Output from SITA WorldTracer
Most of the contents of the bag would be easy to replace – clothing (including a bunch of geek t-shirts), toiletries, a couple of books. There’s a first edition of my mother’s book about the Windscale accident, and the charging cradle for my digital camera. (That explains why I haven’t published some of the photos I took.) And I bought my first ever Oasis album; I was browsing round Tesco’s in Abingdon, looking (unsuccessfully) for noise-cancelling headphones for Lorna, and I came across the double CD “best of” Oasis for £5. Easy come, easy go. At least I still have the bottle of single cask 16 year Laphroiag which I bought at Heathrow…

Antidisestablishmentarianism

Terry Sanderson quotes Gordon Brown’s green paper on the governance of Britain:

“The government reaffirms its commitment to the position of the Church of England by law established, with the sovereign as its supreme governor, and the relationship between the church and state. The government greatly values the role played by the church in national life in a range of spheres.”

I have no issue with the Church of England retaining an official role as a branch of the National Trust, responsible for the care and maintenance of historic buildings. Beyond this, established religion is at best an anachronism and at worst an affront to those who don’t subscribe to it. ((And this will be even more true if they push through their GEP – Gay Expulsion Plan.))
Having said all this, my guess is that this issue intimately depends on the Queen; that she has put her foot down, and promised a constitutional crisis if the government touches the disestablishment issue. I expect that it’s going to have to wait until she’s out of the picture – I can’t imagine Charles or William making a big deal of it. (If, indeed, there is a monarchy after this – how about “The Queen is dead, long live the republic”?)

Tempting fate… no, that's silly: incompetence has nothing to do with fate

Two weeks ago I blogged about the fact that Air Canada had lost my bag between Seattle and Dublin. I wrote:

I was trying to remember the last time this happened. It might have been that terrible trip that I took in the mid-1990’s, when British Airways managed to lose the same bag twice! (The first time when I was flying from Heathrow to Stockholm, the second when I was flying from Lyon to Heathrow a few days later.)

Today, I got to Heathrow nice and early. I checked in, dropped off my bag ((double-checking that it wasn’t too early – if bags stay in the system beyond a certain time limit, they get “embargoed”, which sounds bad.)), and several hours later I boarded a 747-400 to fly home. 8 hours and 46 minutes after take-off, we landed in Seattle; after I’d deplaned ((ugly term)) and cleared Immigration, I went down to the baggage carousel. After a few minutes, I heard them paging half a dozen passengers, including me.
Yup. British Airways had left my bag in London.
I was really looking forward to blogging about how well this trip had gone, especially the final Saturday. But right now I think I need…

  • a litre of cold water
  • some real (i.e. non-airline) food, and
  • a stiff drink

… in that order.

The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry

I just finished reading The London Bombings: An Independent Inquiry by Nafeez Mossadeq Ahmed. It’ an extraordinary book: revelatory and yet deeply frustrating. Please read it: you will be a wiser, more informed citizen for doing so, even though you will not be happier.
Ahmed’s basic thesis is that there ought to be an independent public inquiry. He explains why – the obvious internal inconsistencies in the official record, and the discrepancies between the official explanation and the documented facts of the case. This part is blindingly obvious, because the inconsistencies are so clear and egregious. Next, he points out that any comprehensive inquiry should follow the links between the various actors – radical Islamic groups in the UK, Islamists elsewhere (especially Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Central Asia, and Algeria), western intelligence agencies, and certain commercial interests. The network of connections, deals, compromises, and double-crosses that he describes is both head-spinning in its detail and compelling in its logic.
And it’s this that makes it so depressing. We’d like to be able to explain things in terms of simple causes and effects, because then we can imagine that things might have been otherwise – if only Bush hadn’t invaded Iraq, if only Blair hadn’t been a poodle, then perhaps 7/7 wouldn’t have happened. But after reading Ahmed’s book, this is exposed as simple wishful thinking. These events are part of far-reaching, long-running geopolitical patterns, which individuals, however prominent, can do less to change than we would like. For example: the explosives used on 7/7 almost certainly came from Bosnia, but the British can’t admit this without also admitting a slew of related deals and relationships that they and the Americans have been – and are still – involved in. Terrorist attacks are simply part of the cost of doing business. This is not the stuff of conspiracy nut-cases: it’s all documented. But nobody wants to look at it.
Ultimately, of course, this book is self-refuting. Ahmed calls for a public inquiry, but then makes it crystal clear why the UK and US governments could never allow such an inquiry to take place. But the world is a much leakier place these days- witness Abu Ghraib – and books like this are the result.

When is a bishop like a suicide bomber?

Thomas Sutcliffe in the Independent considers the Bishop of Carlisle and the wannabe suicide bombers in Glagow:

Of course, there are important differences between the bishop and the Glasgow attacker. The bishop restricts himself to condoning the actions of a terrorist God, while the human fireball appointed himself as a direct tool of divine wrath. It’s hardly a distinction to be sneezed at in these dangerous times. But it’s not quite enough to quell the sense that the bishop finds himself in a distant intellectual kinship with the suicide bomber – both worshippers of a God who communicates through the deaths of innocents.

Les Poissons, encore une fois

Back in March, I blogged “I’m presently seated in The Fishes, a delightful pub/restaurant not far from my mother’s house in Oxford.” And here I am again. This time the beer is Guinness, but the WiFi is still free.
The drive down from South Queensferry to Oxford was really easy. I woke early, because at this time of year it never really gets dark in Scotland. I was on the road before 6, and even though I stopped three times I was still in Oxford before 1pm. I took an hour over breakfast in Gretna Green (yes, that Gretna Green), and then made two more short stops to stretch and refuel. The Lake District was beautiful, but wet; otherwise the weather wasn’t a problem. When I reached Oxford, I grabbed some lunch, and soon after 2pm I was visiting my mother at the John Radcliffe infirmary. ((She’d been taken in a few days earlier with acute pancreatitis. No gall stones, fortunately.))

Moving to Reader

For many years I’ve used Ranchero‘s NetNewsWire to keep up with all of the RSS feeds that I keep track of. It’s been a rock-solid application, and I’ve got no complaints.
However, when I headed out on this business trip with my new MacBook, I had a problem. For various reasons, I didn’t want to install any non-work applications, but I still wanted to be able to keep up with my feeds. So before I left, I exported the OPL subscriptions file from NetNewsWire and uploaded it to Google Reader. I’ve used this for the last week, and I don’t think I’m going to be going back. I’ve found Reader more convenient than NetNewsWire: easier to reorganize stuff, easier to scan and catch up with big feeds (like HuffPo and Boing-Boing), easier to integrate into my web-based workflow. (I have a toolbar folder called “Daily” which I open in tabs first thing every morning; I work through the tabs, closing them one by one, and at the end I have Google Reader loaded and ready to go.)
So thanks for years of service, NetNewsWire. But I’m moving on.