Geoff Coupe's Blog

Reflections on life at “De Witte Wand”…

Year: 2008

  • Service Change

    I’ve just noticed that Microsoft has introduced a change to Windows Live Spaces. For some reason best known to themselves, they’ve bolded the fonts used on Custom Lists, and the descriptions of List entries are no longer displayed when the list is displayed in narrow layout columns.
     
    This non-displaying of descriptions has transformed some of my lists into total incomprehensibility. For example, in my "Wines I Have Known" list, I used the description field in the entries to display a rating. Now, these ratings no longer show up on the main page – all you see is a simple list of links to the wine producers. Not very useful.
     
    Needless to say, Microsoft made this change without telling anyone. The Spaces product team even have a Windows Live Spaces blog – The Space Craft. I would have thought that they could have used it to announce changes like this; but no, they are wittering on about The Oscars. As if I could give a toss… I’m in full GOM mode today.
     
    Update: Well, as of the 27th March 2008, I’m pleased to see that Microsoft has responded and rolled back some of the changes. In particular, my wine list now works as I intended. Good stuff. 

  • Nerd Test

    Well, it could have been worse…
     
    NerdTests.com says I'm a Nerd. What are you? Click here!  

  • Lunar Eclipse

    Well, I attempted to see the lunar eclipse last night. There was just this slight problem of there being 100% cloud cover and mist. So I saw nothing. Bugger.

  • Screams in the Night

    Two nights ago, we both woke up in the middle of the night on hearing a sound. It was made by something that was just outside of the bedroom window. Neither of us had ever heard anything like it. It was so strange that neither of us wanted to get out of bed and investigate the owner of the sound.
     
    Thanks to Bill Oddie’s Wild Side, I’ve now found out what was screaming outside of our bedroom. It was a hedgehog. It was very angry or distressed about something. Here’s what it sounds like.
     
         

  • Dissecting Dawkins’ Fleas

    Over the past year or so, a new niche in the book market has appeared: books written by authors who attempt a riposte of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. They have become known as Dawkins’ Fleas (an allusion to a statement made by the poet W. B. Yeats about his imitators).
     
    Paula Kirby has taken on the sterling task of reviewing four of these books in great detail. She has done a magnificent job. Hercules cleaning out the Augean stables comes to mind.

  • Who Are The Fire Starters?

    David Thompson asks this question over at his blog. A valid point, I feel. It would appear that some folks think that Mo should not be castigated for wanting to find his cigarette lighter. But hang on, who is starting these fires?

  • Despairing

    Damian Thompson is in a somewhat despairing mood at the moment. Can’t say I blame him.

  • Poor Max

    Max Gogarty is 19. Just about to start a gap year, and he’s off to India to discover himself. He’s also landed a job blogging about it in The Guardian. Fun, huh? Let Mr. Eugenides take up the story. Poor Max. I feel a smidgen of sympathy for him. Only a smidgen, though.

  • Cretin

    When I saw and heard President Bush justifying the use of torture and citing the families of the London 7/7 bombings as a rationale, I wondered how long it would be before Rachel responded. As I expected, she is not impressed. Bush is beyond contempt.

  • Watch the Skies

    Just a heads up to say that this week sees a lunar eclipse on Wednesday night. I’m hoping that the sky will be clear enough to see it. I’m also reading up on what I need to know in order to try and photograph it.

  • A Vignette

    It’s almost 14 years to the day since Derek Jarman died. His friend Howard Sooley pens a touching vignette of Jarman and his garden at Prospect Cottage in today’s Observer. Worth reading.

  • Geek Toys

    I’ve been somewhat distracted of late and neglecting my blogging. Nothing untoward. Part of it has been because of building work here at the farmhouse, part of it is because the garden is waking up unseasonably early from its winter sleep. But part of it is because I have acquired a new toy.

    I’ve been longing to get a Tablet PC for some time now. Ever since I had the chance to play with the first Tablet PC that HP brought to the market back in 2003. Needless to say, that first model had limitations, but now with the latest generation of models I feel we are at the point where it’s worth my investing in a tablet for myself.

    I’ve gone for the latest HP Tablet for the consumer market: the HP TX2000. This entry is being blogged on it using the handwriting recognition capabilities of windows Vista – which I have to say are quite scarily impressive, even with my appalling handwriting.

    Thanks to its wireless capabilities I can now use the Tablet in the house and garden, and even listen to music that is being streamed from my music collection held on my Windows Home Server. At the moment I’m being serenaded by Cecilia Bartoli giving her all to Vivaldi. Bliss.

  • Theatrical Experiences

    Alastair Appleton writes of his visit to see the National Theatre’s production of the hour we knew nothing of each other. He thought it was wonderful, and his enthusiasm makes me sad that I no longer live in London with those cultural experiences just outside my door. But only for a moment. I can now take a different kind of pleasure from a walk in the countryside. It’s just outside my door.

  • The Apocalypse Bus Tour

    The Beeb’s been showing a series of quirky documentaries, each highlighting a slightly off-beat look at people: the Wonderland series. They’ve all been rather good, but last night’s episode: The End of the World Bus Tour was a particularly fine example. The documentary crew joined a group of nearly 50 Christian fundamentalists who were touring the Holy Land in a coach, clearly relishing the forthcoming apocalypse, and the fact that they would be whisked off to heaven by the Rapture. There’s a good review of the programme here.
     
    The filmmakers did not sneer at these deluded folk, but let them speak for themselves. And indeed, it was easy to feel compassion for some of them, who had clearly been damaged by life’s vicissitudes, and who had turned to a simple faith to bear them up. Not all of them though. I won’t readily forget the dead-eyed Hannah, a teenage student who seemed to take some pleasure in avowing to the film director that "we are all born evil", and that while she would be going to heaven, "you will burn in hell for all eternity". Hannah is apparently taking a number of courses of study, including photography, textile design and, astoundingly, critical thinking. The irony is, I feel sure, totally lost on her.

  • Below The Horizon

    I’ve complained about the falling standards of Horizon before. It appears that what was once the Beeb’s proud flagship of its science reporting has in recent years been dumbed down to a level more suited to the audience of the Teletubbies, if that wasn’t an insult to babies everywhere. I did entertain some faint hopes that the programme seemed to have improved somewhat in the latest series. The programme fronted by physicist Dr. Brian Cox was interesting and thought-provoking. Probably because it let him do the talking.
     
    So I admit I had been lulled into a false sense of security when I started watching last night’s Horizon: How To Make Better Decisions. It began with the voiceover smugly stating: "You thought that deciding to watch this programme was a rational, logical decision made with free will" … "Congratulations about watching this programme, it might be the best decision you’ve ever made." On hearing this, my heart sank. This sounded like an ominous warning that the programme would prove to be a clunker. And so it came to pass; we were introduced to some irritating twit called Garth Sundem who fills pages with abstruse mathematical formulae in an attempt to pull the wool over our eyes about the decision-making process. I lasted about five minutes before I took a rational, logical decision of my own free will to turn the channel to something else. From Thomas Sutcliffe’s review of the programme in today’s Independent, I’d say that was the best decision I made last night. Tellingly, Sutcliffe ends his review with the damning observation that:
    There was a time when you couldn’t check up on Horizon’s contributors on Google in this way. There was also a time when you didn’t need to.
    Quite. Oh, and what did I end up watching in place of Horizon? Well it was the first episode of Phoo Action. Totally bizarre, but at least it didn’t take itself seriously, and had nice caricatures of the royal princes. It reminded me of an update for the Noughties of the old Sixties Batman TV series, and was none the worse for that.

  • The Turn of a Card

    Diamond Geezer writes of his experience with business cards. It’s very like my own experience in the days when the organisation I worked for kept on reinventing itself (for no good reason that I could discern).

  • Definition of an IDiot

    I haven’t come across Rabbi Boteach before, but on this evidence he is not the sharpest pencil in the box.

  • Petition

    I signed a petition today. I find the very idea that Tony Blair might become President of Europe obscene in the extreme. 

  • Tatchell on Qaradawi

    Peter Tatchell has an excellent opinion piece on the UK government’s decision to ban Muslim extremist cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi from entering Britain. Tatchell sees it as "illiberal, unwarranted and unmerciful". I agree. We also both agree that Qaradawi is an intolerant hypocrite, but what better way to show up his true nature than to allow him to enter Britain for needed medical treatment? As Tatchell says,
    "Let’s hope his surgeon is a gay Israeli Jew – and that he performs a successful operation, so that Qaradawi is forced to acknowledge that he owes his life to a Jewish sodomite".

  • Open Mouth…

    …Change feet. It appears as though Dr. Williams is on a roll at the moment. I hope he comes to his senses soon.
     
    Update: I think Andrew Brown’s comment in The Guardian pretty much nails it:
    "Only if Islamic law can be reduced to a game played between consenting adults can it be acceptably enforced in this country; and that’s not, I think, how it is understood by its practitioners." 
    Update 2: Yasmin Alibhai-Brown also has her doubts: What he wishes on us is an abomination. I can’t help but feel that she’s right.