Geoff Coupe's Blog

Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

Year: 2005

  • Fasten Your Seatbelts…

    …It’s going to be a bumpy ride: Ratzinger’s got the job.

    There clearly is no god. "Billions of voices, making all the wrong choices…"

  • Microsoft Malaise?

    An interesting post from Dare Obasanjo today. While I expect the Slashdot kids to heave rocks at their hated foe Microsoft at every opportunity, it is somewhat different when a Microsoftie such as Dare refers to "the current malaise that has smothered main campus [at Microsoft]".

    Watch this space – I think the pressure is building.

     

  • Shell Colleagues Celebrate Diversity and Inclusiveness

    My old employer, Shell, was, and is, very keen to encourage employee networks. While I was with Shell, I was a member of the GLBTN-NL (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Network for Shell in the Netherlands). I am very pleased to hear that the Network is organising this year to participate in the Amsterdam Gay Pride Canal Parade on 6 August 2005.

    The organising committee writes:

    Shell Nederland has agreed with enthusiasm to sponsor our participation (not the parade as such) – this agreement is the result of a number of years of lobbying with Shell Nederland management for visible recognition and celebration of who we are and what we do in Shell, regardless of sexual orientation.

    Many people both inside and outside our network have helped make our case, for which we are very thankful. We are now working hard to have a great day for all in August, again with the help of many people across Shell in the Netherlands.

    We encourage you all to come and watch on Saturday August 6 along the Prinsengracht, with friends and family!

    I’ll certainly be there to cheer them on. Well done to them!

  • Amaztype

    The Language Log today points me towards Amaztype. I think that this cross between Web Services and Typography deserves an entry in my "Slightly Bizarre" list. So it’s got one.

  • Things I Don’t Miss About Work

    #4 in an occasional series.

    Dilbert today sums it up pretty well. Not that all my managers were bad – far from it, most were excellent, but there were a few around that I thought fit this particular glove…

  • Adobe Buys Macromedia

    So, Adobe is buying Macromedia for a cool $3.4 billion. While I’ll let the pundits ruminate on whether that is a good thing or a bad thing, there are just two tangentially-related points that I will comment on.

    The first is that Macromedia’s Flash technology is, like most technology, capable of being used for good or ill. This was brought home to me yesterday while compiling the list of "Wines I Have Known". I tried, wherever possible, to include a hyperlink to a wine producer’s web site in my entries. A lot of these web sites used Flash on the entry page. And, with very few exceptions, their use of Flash was utter, utter crap. Where was usability? Where was the user experience to entice the user into the site and deliver information? Nowhere. Instead all I got was completely pointless Flash animations, done purely because the web designers thought it was a cool thing to do. Take it from me: it is not cool, it is fucking counter-productive.

    So, point one: Flash technology should be used with extreme care, and preferably NOT AT ALL on home pages.

    Point two: I really don’t think Adobe know how to program. Yes, their applications may be powerful, but their user interfaces stink like rotting fish, and they blithely ignore any conventions of the underlying platform. I’ve complained before on this blog about Photoshop Elements, but other stuff of theirs is just as bad. They remind me of SAP – you vill learn to do it our way, or else! I remember many years ago pointing out to Dr. Peter Zencke (one of the directors of SAP) that I thought that their user interface in SAP R/3 would be better following the user interface guidelines of the underlying platform, to whit, Windows. I got an earful which told me in no uncertain terms that he just didn’t get it. Well, I don’t think Adobe gets it either.

  • Another Pointer To Your Personality?

    Following on the theme of pointers to your personality, there is apparently some evidence that parasites can affect personality.

    It’s long been known that certain parasites affect the behaviour of their hosts in ways that tend to ensure the success of the parasite’s survival. For example there’s a fluke, Dicrocoelium dendriticum, that will make its intermediate host, an ant, climb up blades of grass and stay there until the grass, and the ant, is eaten by a grazing mammal.

    And research into the cat parasite, Toxoplasma gondii, seems to indicate that it has an effect on the behaviour of intermediate hosts. Rats, for example, are afraid of cats – for entirely understandable reasons. However, researchers at Oxford University demonstrated that rats that were infected by Toxoplasma appeared to lose their fear of cats. This is good news as far as Toxoplasma is concerned (but obviously not for the foolhardy rat) as it increases the chances that the infected rat is eaten by a cat, so that Toxoplasma ends up in its final host.

    You will be delighted to hear that Toxoplasma is also very common in humans – some authorities think that half of all the people on earth carry its cysts in their brains (yup, that’s where Toxoplasma lives in its intermediate hosts).

    So, if Toxoplasma affects the behaviour of rats, what does it do to us? Well, parasitologist Jaroslv Flegr has been looking at this. And it does appear that there is a statistically significant difference between people who are infected and the control group. Infected women are said to be more outgoing and warmhearted than controls, whereas infected men are more insecure with proneness to feelings of guilt.

    While such behaviour differences may not matter while you’re around the domestic cat, I wonder if it could be significant if you’re on safari?

  • Wine List Coming

    I’ve been working on a list of "Wines I have known", which I’ll probably post here as a list. The idea of doing so was prompted by Paul Stamp putting up a similar list on his blog. Not being afraid to steal with pride, where appropriate, I have no qualms about doing something similar.

    The ratings system is very simple – from one to five stars:

    – Affordable, easy drinking –              
    – Good stuff –                                     
    – Very good –                                      
    – Excellent, for special occasions –      
    – I’ve just died and gone to Heaven – 

    You can tell I’m no expert of wine, I just know what I like (the cry of the Philistine down the ages, I hear you say). Well tough, it’s my list.

    I only have two five star entries, both for dessert wines, interestingly enough, enough though I’m basically a red wine drinker. One is for Chateau d’Yquem (and I still have a half bottle nestling in the cellar – yippee!). The other is for Tokaji Eszencia, which I was lucky enough to be able to taste through the generosity of a friend of mine. He was presented with an exceedingly rare (and it goes without saying, expensive) bottle as a birthday present from his wife, and he poured out a glass for me to try. What’s that expression? Like angels pissing on your tongue… Yep, that comes close…

    The list will have hyperlinks in most of the entries, either to the producers own web site, or to writers on the Web who know much more about this stuff than I. I’m finding I’m making quite a lot of links to The Winedoctor, who writes well, but is not afraid to send himself up when the occasion demands. Ah, Blue Nun! I remember it well. And no, it’s not on the list.

  • Wine Is A Pointer To Your Personality…

    …So gushes Dr. Irwin Wolkoff, a Toronto-based psychiatrist.

    "Red Burgundy is the goddess of wine. It’s really a lot like the Judeo-Christian God. One does not question the will of pinot noir. It rewards, it punishes and it is ours to follow without ever losing faith. The vast bulk of pinot worshippers are helpless, hopeless (wine) nerds."

    Well, I always did view psychiatrists with more than a modicum of suspicion, so I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised at his bizarre theory. At least it’s a step short of oinomancy, so one should be grateful for small mercies.

  • How Will It All End?

    Being an increasingly grumpy old man, I take a positive pleasure in reading stories such as "What a Way to Go", in today’s Guardian. I can spend many happy hours ruminating on the chances of each of the ten threats to human existence listed. My money’s on number 9: the Super-Volcano.

    As a friend once remarked to me: "You have to remember that we live at the bottom of a gravity well, on a gas-covered planet going around a nuclear fireball. I’m not sure if this is the stable set of parameters that we think it should be…"

  • Real or Imagined Threat?

    I was watching the report by BBC Home Affairs editor Mark Easton on the BBC News last night. I was struck by his language, both verbal and body, that seemed to me to be exaggerating the threat of al-Qaeda. Yes, we can all agree that Kamel Bourgass was a dangerous individual, and it is better for us all that he is now behind bars. But was he a highly-trained individual in an al-Qaeda ring, who manufactured poisons? Mark Easton’s report certainly came down heavily, one might say, unrelentingly, on that side, with his theatrical brandishing of jars of Nivea and his language, which seemed to me to be more redolent of the Yellow Press, rather than sober reporting from the BBC.

    Because there are still some awkward aspects in the case that Easton played down or skated over completely:

    • Four other suspects in the "UK cell" were acquitted this week of any part in a conspiracy, and the trial against a further four has been abandoned.
    • Despite Easton’s jars of Nivea, no trace of ricin was ever found in the flat where the arrests were made – in fact, only recipes were found.
    • The recipes themselves are apparently direct copies of recipes concocted by the US survivalist Kurt Saxon, and readily available from an Internet web site based not in Afghanistan, but in Palo Alto, California. 

    A much more sober assessment of the facts, written by Jon Silverman, is buried away on the BBC News web site. It probably does not make such good tub-thumping television as Easton’s over-the-top report.

    As Duncan Campbell, writing in today’s Guardian, puts it: "I do not doubt that Bourgass would have contemplated causing harm if he was competent to do so. But he was an Islamist yobbo on his own, not an Al Qaida-trained superterrorist."

  • Landscape and Memory

    Vincent Creelan over on his Eclectic Tardis Blog has a contemplative post describing a walk through a local landscape and his life.

    Quote

    If only we could be Dr Who

    Yesterday was a marvellous day, bright sunshine, fresh breeze, a real sense of spring …and summer to come. The Cherry blossums are already fading and the Elder flower and Hawthorne blooms are showing. I went for a long…ish walk with my partner and his sister Claire around Scrabo Country Park at the top of the Ards peninsular. This is an area that has been inhabited for thousands of years, on the hill where Scrabo tower now stands, iron age mounds can be seen scattered around (what is now a golf course) and when they dug the foundations for the tower they found a hoard of coins from the Roman times. Also from that vantage point you can see right down the lough and could imagine the times when the Viking long boats appeared when they sacked the Abbeys along the coast from Portaferry right up to Greyabbey 12 centuries ago. The tower itself..a folly..was erected in 1856 in memory of a local  titled Aristocrat who met an untimely death, built in his memory by friends and faithfull tennants…well nearly, lol, those were poor times(potato famine etc) and the grand design had to be somewhat tailored to  meet the budget. Nonetheless it is an imposing structure which sits high on a hill visible for many miles, from its tower you can see to Belfast on one side, the Mourne Mountains on another and across to Scotland too.

    …

    End Quote

    His description of the landscape reminded me very much of walking on the Isle of Man – all the echoes of previous societies and lives being etched in the lie of the land. And it might very well have been that the Viking long boats that he mentions came from the Isle of Man. It was in a strategic position in the middle of the Irish Sea. From there, the Vikings were very well-positioned to carry out rape and pillage on Ireland, Scotland Wales and England.

    He goes on to reflect on the choices we make in life. He wonders what it would be like if he were able to go back and make different choices – the choices that he would make with the benefit of hindsight.

    Well, I wonder – I have a very strong feeling that if I were able to do that, the "me" that is here now would not be the same "me" if I had made those different choices. While on one level I have the sense that I am still the person I was when I was 20 – just older and greyer – I wonder if that is really true. We are surely shaped by the decisions and experiences that we undergo all the time – and the individual that has resulted in me would be very different had I taken a different path through life. It’s like identical twins – they may start out as genetically identical specimens, but they end up as two distinct individuals as a result of their life experiences.

  • I Can’t Believe He Said It…

    I’m referring, of course, to Michael Howard, leader of the UK Conservative Party. During the press session to introduce the Conservatives’ manifesto, he came out with:

    "On May the fifth you can let the sunshine of hope break through the clouds of disappointment we all feel!"

    The soundbite is worthy of a particularly oliagious Hallmark card. No wonder many of the assembled hacks of the Press started laughing out loud in an unseemly fashion.

  • Memento Mori

    Although I’ve categorised this post as "Science", it could equally have been "Society" or even "Art".

    What it is, is a reference to a beautiful and thought-provoking essay: The proper reverence due those who have gone before, written by Paul Z. Myers and posted on his Pharyngula blog. It is a wonderful example of the essayist’s art.

    An example of the beauty:

    That’s another thing; a bone isn’t just beautiful operational engineering, it’s a trace of a person. It’s a melancholy memento of all that’s been lost…here is this human being who struggled and loved and dreamed and hurt for sixty years, and all that I had of her was a few exquisitely patterned swirls of hydroxyapatite. So much was gone, so much lost, and that’s the fate of all of us—all it takes is a few generations for all personal memory to fade away, and all that’s left is abstractions. For most of us, there won’t even be bits of dry bone in a box in a forgotten room, we’ll be ash and slime, our existence unremembered.

    And to get our brains thinking, Myers points out that if you take the Bible to be the record of the history of a people (hundreds of thousands, if not millions of individuals) covering a span of 2,000 years, then you would need 1,600 Bibles to cover the span of time that lies between us and Lucy.

    Do your brain a favour – go and read his post.

  • Oh Nooooooo…

    Well, you feared it, I feared it, and it looks as though it’s gone and happened – the film of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is completely fucked up beyond all belief.

    Now, I have to say that I haven’t seen it, so there’s a faint chance that all will be well and it will be a wonderful adaptation. But, and it’s a big but, I’ve just read the reviews on the Planet Magrathea site. A short sample:

    "The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy movie is bad. Really bad. You just won’t believe how vastly, staggeringly, jaw-droppingly bad it is. I mean, you might think that The Phantom Menace was a hopelessly misguided attempt to reinvent a much-loved franchise by people who, though well-intentioned, completely failed to understand what made the original popular – but that’s just peanuts to the Hitchhiker’s movie. Listen.

    And so on…"

    Oh dear me. Oh bugger. This is bad news indeed.

    But don’t take it from me. Read either the short review or the long review – and weep.

    Update 26 December 2007: Well, I’ve now seen the film. And you know what? It isn’t as bad as I feared.

  • Good Diet ‘Crucial’ in AIDS Fight?

    The BBC News web site is carrying a story at the moment saying that: "South Africa’s health minister has called for good nutrition to become the frontline treatment for HIV saying it was vital for people living with Aids" (my emphasis added).

    Frontline treatment? I would have thought that Anti-RetroViral (AVR) drugs were the frontline treatment. It may well be that Dr Manto Tshabalala-Msimang is being quoted out of context. However, since she is previously on record as promoting garlic and beetroot as a treatment for HIV, I fear that once again she has opened her mouth merely to change feet.

    It would be funny, were it not for the fact that she holds the power of life and death over those unfortunate enough to be HIV+ in South Africa. She is a misguided woman who is doing great harm to those she is supposedly serving.

  • Talking about Blog Building Tips For Business And Pleasure

    I found a very useful set of tips and pointers about getting the best out of blogging in an entry on Dave’s Imaginary Sound Space:

    Quote

    Blog Building Tips For Business And Pleasure

    If you’re looking for sound advice on how to build a better blog then read on. Sharing practical tips built from experience is one of the best ways of learning about effective blogging. This handy collection of blogging resources is designed to help beginners and the financially motivated gain control of their blog space. I’ve included some tools that I find useful for blogging along with a few tips of my own.

    General blogging tips

    This group of links covers essential blogging tips and answers the most frequently asked questions. There’s advice here for both beginners and experienced bloggers to digest.

    • Building a Better Blog by Brian Bailey, presents his Top 10 ideas for how to build a better blog. Good back to basics advice and tips dealing with topics like categories and content.
    • How to Blog is a piece by Tony Pierce, winner of the Bloggies 2005 category ‘best article or essay about weblogs’. 30 topical tips on style, technology and telling it like it is.
    • 47 key tips from the World’s best BLOGGERS serves bite sized chunks of wisdom with links to each guru’s weblog.
    • Blog Tips – Central Register has a collection of links to blogging tips covering many important aspects of blog building and maintenance.
    Business blogging tips
     
    These links focus on commercial blogging interests. If you’re interested in monetizing your blog or blogging professionally you’ll find some helpful info on how to approach it here.

    Useful blogging tools

    A few of the tools I use, how and why I use them. There are lots more tools scattered around the home page that come in handy from time to time.

    End Quote

    There’s lots more stuff in this entry, so check it out.

  • Encyclopedia Mythica

    Ah, the wonders of serendipity… Today, I was idly checking out Blogmap, to see who was blogging near me. And then I came across the Encyclopedia Mythica, because one of the contributors (or the editor?) is based in The Hague.

    I see that it has some entries on Celtic mythology, including references to the Isle of Man (e.g. Mannan – but I think that should be Manannan). I’ll have to check this out further…

  • Your Feets Too Big…

    That title from an old Fats Waller song seemed appropriate for this site that determines just how big your ecological footprint is.

    I’ll wager that you’re living beyond the planet’s means to sustain you (just like me).

  • Yellow Arrow(TM)

    I feel in a Victor Meldrew mood this morning, so I’m not feeling particularly receptive towards the Yellow Arrow(TM) global art project. I suppose, given the colour, you might say that I’m feeling somewhat jaundiced about it… To me, it’s as irritating as the meme for reversed baseball caps.

    The basic idea is that if you see something of interest, or something that is meaningful to you, you mark it with a sticker in the shape of a yellow arrow. The sticker has a unique code on it, and using the code, you send an SMS to a central number (in the US) with your message and the code. Then, anyone else who sees the arrow can send an SMS, using the unique code, to retrieve your message from the central number.

    Call me a cynic if you like, but who’s making the money out of all these SMSes?