I don’t know where the year has gone, but here we are at the last day of 2010. And in the Dutch countryside, the last day of the year is celebrated by Carbideschieten. So once again, we enjoyed the hospitality of our neighbours; drank mulled wine, and ate oliebollen and snert. It was the very definition of gezelligheid – a practically untranslatable Dutch word.
Year: 2010
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Found and Lost
When I first moved up to London from the countryside, way back in the early 1970s, I became a volunteer helper at one of the first gay counselling groups that sprang up around that time. This was Centre, long since gone, but it was similar to London Friend, which still exists.
At Centre, I met some people who I can still count amongst my friends, nearly forty years on. One of them was Sameer Bowyer, a volunteer like myself, but who took me under his wing to help me learn the ropes. Sameer was an interesting guy, a member of the Royal Zoological Society (he was a herpetologist) and a jeweller (he was making jewellery for an eclectic set of people such as Alvin Stardust, David Bowie, Mick Jagger, Toyah, George Melly, Humphrey Littleton, and many other pop and jazz stars of the time). He kept a collection of snakes at his home, and I remember visiting him once at feeding time. I was simultaneously fascinated and somewhat taken aback to find that their diet consisted of live white mice.
However, we had rather lost touch with each other by the end of the 1970s. Centre had closed, and we were both involved in our own lives and in our work. It was through my work that I moved to the Netherlands in 1983. On the occasional trip back to London, I would go to the open-air art market that was held on Sundays along the Bayswater Road, where Sameer used to have a pitch. The first couple of times, the other traders said that they remembered him, but that he hadn’t been there for a long while; later they would simply shake their heads – they didn’t know the name.
And that’s where it stood for many years. Then in 2008, I was idly using Google to search for long-lost friends, and turned up a reference to a Sameer Bowyer. Curious, I followed it up, and thus re-established contact with him after a gap of thirty years. Emails and the occasional telephone call followed to exchange our stories of what had been happening in the intervening period. He’d lived a full and happy life, but recently tragedy had struck – his partner of 34 years had recently died of meningitis. Sameer himself was not in the best of health, although at that point no firm diagnosis had been made.
I had hoped to meet up with him during a brief visit to the UK last year, but he was ill at the time and did not feel up to receiving visitors. So we contented ourselves with exchanging Christmas cards.
This year, I sent him a card as usual. Alas, I received an email yesterday from the husband of his niece to say that Sameer died on the 7th December, and his funeral was on the 15th. Apparently, he came out of hospital a short while ago having being told that his lung cancer (the diagnosis finally came through…) had passed into his lymphatic system and had entered the brain. He spent his last few days in a hospice in Windsor.
I regret that we did not manage to meet up again. However, I am glad that we managed to re-establish contact and exchange tales of what had happened in that thirty year gap. I shall remember Sameer with fondness. A real gent.
Addendum 19 November 2019: I’ve managed to find an old photo taken of us both when we were at Centre – that’s Sameer on the right in his wolfskin coat…
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Am I a Microsoft Fanboi?
I think the answer has to be “no”.
Honestly, I do care about what Microsoft does. After all, I rely on its products to power my computing infrastructure. I use Windows 7 on our Home Theater PC, our PCs and Tablets, and Windows Home Server for our media storage and computer backup.
And yet, I find myself increasingly griping about the directions that Microsoft is taking. If it’s not the shortcomings of Windows Live, it’s the idiocy of the Windows Marketplace, or it’s the brain-dead decision to remove Drive Extender from Windows Home Server.
What on earth is going on?
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UN Restores Resolution
I noted earlier this month that a UN Committee had proposed removing the reference to sexual orientation in the UN’s resolution on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. It was a move led by African and Arabic nations – in other words, the usual suspects when it comes to their record on human rights abuses against lesbians, gay men and transgendered people. As the Swedish representative on the Committee said at the time:
…sexual orientation had often been the motive for extrajudicial killings, and the deletion of the reference would amount to the Committee looking the other way concerning arbitrary executions based on sexual orientation.
Quite.
Fortunately, there has been a reaction to this draft resolution, led by the US Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice. Now the UN has voted to drop the amendment and retain the reference to sexual orientation in the resolution against the unjustified killing of minority groups.
While the original reference still stands for the moment, it’s clear that those who wish to reverse progress will not be giving up in a hurry. Typical of them is Zimbabwe’s ambassador to the UN, Chitsaka Chipaziwa, who attacked the US amendment, saying there was no need to refer explicitly to sexual orientation.
“We will not have it foisted on us,” he said, according to Reuters. “We cannot accept this, especially if it entails accepting such practices as bestiality, paedophilia and those other practices many societies would find abhorrent in their value systems.
Yep, I’m sure that he and others of his ilk are only too happy to heap up strawmen and turn a blind eye to what happens in their countries. As Hilary Clinton is reported to have said:
The U.S. reintroduced the language to send an unequivocal message that “No one should be killed for who they are.”
“Sadly, many people around the world continue to be targeted and killed because of their sexual orientation,” she said. “These heinous crimes must be condemned and investigated wherever they occur.”
And for some of us, the struggle continues, with real and present danger.
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Rare Exports
I know I’ve blogged about this short film before, but I really think it is a little gem for Christmastime. The makers have now come up with a full-length feature film on the same theme, but I can’t help feeling that less is more. This short film hits all the right buttons.
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Winter Wonderland
If you don’t have to travel anywhere, it’s rather pretty outside. There have been several falls of snow in the past week, and the daytime temperatures are still below freezing. Driving in this is somewhat less pleasurable; fortunately, we’ve got most of the Christmas supplies in. I’m hoping that we can make one last run to the village for last minute supplies on Friday, and then we should be all set for a cosy Christmas.
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Two Data Points
While it is true that the Netherlands is one of the most prosperous countries in the EU, the other side of the coin is that there is also more poverty than in previous years. In particular, after a long period of decline, the percentage of poorer children in Dutch society increased in 2009.
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Political Ska
Although I no longer live in the UK, I still follow what’s happening there. And the acts of the new coalition government fill me with despair. We seem to have learned nothing since Thatcher. Here’s a musical take on the situation.
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Microsoft’s Marketplace Merry-go-round
My mobile phone is an ancient (in mobile phone terms) Nokia 6310i. I bought it for myself back in 2002. It still functions perfectly well as a phone, but in these days of Smartphones, it’s positively primitive.
Thus far, I’ve successfully resisted the lure of replacing it with a Smartphone. I certainly don’t want to buy an iPhone, I’m not convinced by smartphones based on Google’s Android operating system, and the Windows Mobile operating system always struck me as unbearably clunky. Now, however, Microsoft has introduced a completely new smartphone operating system into the market: Windows Phone 7. My impression, from the reviews is that it’s pretty good as a first version of a completely new system. So I’ve been casting envious glances at the WP7 phones that are available and wondering if I should take the plunge. Here in the Netherlands, that means that, at the moment, I have a choice of three handsets: The Samsung Omnia 7, the HTC 7 Trophy and the LG Optimus 7. Of the three, the LG Optimus 7 would be the one I would go for. But should I do it? Apart from the cost (even though it’s a good deal less than the eye-watering price tags on Apple’s iPhones), when looking further into it, there are some flies in the ointment that rather temper my enthusiasm.
The thing is, like other smartphones, a Windows Phone 7 device lives in an ecosystem that makes material such as music, video and applications available. For Windows Phone 7 devices, that means Microsoft’s Windows Phone Marketplace, and I’ve discovered a problem with it.
The marketplace is built on the same back-end infrastructure used by Microsoft’s Xbox Live Marketplace and the Zune Marketplace. This infrastructure is country-aware, that is, the products and services that are offered through the marketplaces may vary from country to country. Here, for example, are two screenshots of the Zune software on my PC displaying the marketplace. The first is taken with my PC with its location set to the US, while the second has the PC location set to The Netherlands.
As you can see, the range of products available in the US is much broader (music, videos, podcasts, channels and applications for both the Zune and Windows Phone 7) than the current miserable selection available to us Dutch. We only get to be able to rent videos.
The Zune device is not officially available here in The Netherlands (or indeed lots of other countries), but many people buy one from the US. Then, in order to gain access to the wider range of products and services, they create an account for themselves in the US.
However, somewhere along the line, a design decision was taken within Microsoft regarding how to register the country of residence of marketplace users that now makes the whole marketplace ecosystem unworkable for some of us. The issue is that, once you have registered a country of residence, you can neither change it nor even delete your account. In addition, you’ll find that, if you try and register a credit card to pay for marketplace purchases, the card must have a country billing address that matches the one registered in the marketplace.
So those people who have created an account in a different country from where they now live are stuck. This not only applies to people who have bought grey imports of the Zune device, but innocents who have bought their device in the US when they lived there, but who now live and work elsewhere.
It also applies to me. I don’t own an Xbox, a Zune device or a Windows Phone. However, I made the mistake of downloading and playing with the Zune software about a year ago to compare it with Windows Media Player (that’s another story). Along the way, I created a Zune account using my Windows Live ID, just to try out the experience, not realising that the country of residence would be hardwired to the US without any possibility of change or deletion. At the time, I just shrugged my shoulders and thought no more about it. However, now that the Windows Phone 7 is available in The Netherlands, that means that I can’t actually buy any applications through the marketplace, either in the US or in the Netherlands. In effect, I find myself in limbo, along with probably thousands of others.
The issue is recognised by Microsoft, there have been many threads about it in both the Zune and the Windows Phone 7 forums. Jessica Zahn, a Senior Program Manager for Zune, has written in one of these threads:
Like I said, it’s not about what your Live ID itself says – it’s about what country you chose when you first joined Zune with that Live ID. You can change your Live ID country at account.live.com, I think – it’s the Zune country that can’t be changed. Here’s an example of why it’s complicated:
You live in France. You sign up for Zune and you say you’re in the US so you can use the Zune software and Marketplace. You buy lots of music, and we love you for that.
When Zune offers a Marketplace in France, you decide it’s time to switch over so you can read everything in your native language and get access to music that’s only available in the marketplace for France, etc. BUT what happens to the music you already bought, that we don’t have rights to sell in France?
Do we take it away from you? Not let you re-download .wmas or video? What will the content owners say if they find out we were selling content to people in regions where we’re not allowed to sell?
I can tell you we’re working through those questions now and figuring out how to allow people to move countries, etc – but it’s not easy, and those of you who have said this has been a problem for Xbox for a long time are correct – and we use the same infrastructure as Xbox.
There’s a couple of things about that. The first is her reference to “music [that] you already bought”. The thing is, according to the terms and conditions, we don’t “buy” music (or indeed any other content offered through the Marketplaces) – we only license it. Section 8:
Marketplace is the online store for the service. All content made available through the Marketplace is licensed, not sold, to you.
And further, the terms and conditions spell out very clearly in section 3 that:
We may change, delete, modify or discontinue, temporarily or permanently, the service, any functions, features or content of the service, at any time and for any reason, in any country, in our sole discretion.
Due to contractual or other limitations, some content available in the service may from time to time become unavailable. Consequently, you may not be able to re-download or re-stream certain content that you have purchased. For music and video content, to the extent we receive information from the content owners indicating the date their content will be unavailable, we will endeavor to share this information with you.
Your ability to access the service and obtain certain content is restricted to your territory. If you change your account to a different territory, you may not be able to re-download or re-stream content that was available to you in your previous territory. In your new territory, you may be required to purchase and pay for content even if you have already paid for that content in the previous territory.
So professing concerns about “taking your music away from you” seems a little disingenuous – it’s been quite clear from day one in the terms and conditions that this was always on the cards. It’s interesting, though, that the terms and conditions cover the case where the country (territory) is changed, even though this is not currently possible.
Ms. Zahn’s solution to this conundrum is for users caught in this trap to create another Windows Live ID. That is both simplistic and doesn’t really address the problem. I’ve been using my Windows Live ID for a long time – it’s tied to my primary email address (which I’ve had since the early 1990s). Setting up a new Windows Live ID for a Windows Phone that is not using that email address doesn’t help.
However, it does appear that Microsoft are thinking about the issue, so perhaps I’ll be able to change or delete my current Zune account (which I have never used) in readiness for the Dutch Windows Phone 7 marketplace when it finally gets launched in mid-2011. Nonetheless, knowing my luck, and on past experiences with Microsoft, my betting is that the Dutch Marketplace will only offer applications in Dutch. As a Dutch user vents in the same thread:
I may be Dutch and live in the Netherlands, but can it please be my own decision what language I speak? I speak English at home and I speak English at work and I have never ever installed a non-English piece of software on my PC. But Microsoft doesn’t want to open the windows Phone market place for me to download free apps to my phone, because I am Dutch. It is so frustrating, I can’t even put it into words. I just got my nice Samsung phone and I have never felt so much frustration with a new gadget.
It looks as though if I were to buy a Windows Phone 7 device today, I would have a device that has had a lobotomy forced upon it by Microsoft’s Marketplace missteps. I think I’ll stick with my trusty Nokia for a while longer.
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The Geminids – II
Well, I had a spot of luck after all last night, despite the fact that we had snow showers and the sky was cloudy during the evening. I woke up at 03:30 am and found that the sky was cloudless, although it was a little misty. However, I was able to see Orion, Taurus and the Pleiades quite clearly through the window, so I settled down to watch for an hour. I chickened out of getting dressed and going outside – it was –5C.
I tallied 21 meteors and three planes during that time, so it wasn’t entirely wasted effort.
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The Geminids
It’s the peak of the annual Geminid meteor shower tonight. I’m hoping that there will be clear skies here, but at the moment we have snow showers passing through, so it’s highly probable that 2010 will be another missed opportunity. Sigh.
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Science or Dogma
A few days ago, I mentioned Jacob Bronowski and his TV series The Ascent of Man. Here’s that scene of him speaking at Auschwitz, explaining the difference between science and dogma.
(hat tip to Alun Salt for providing me with the link to this key scene)
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Sorrowful Songs
Henryk Górecki’s 3rd Symphony, the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, was composed in 1976. While many take its meaning as a remembrance of the Holocaust, Górecki himself said that it was an evocation of the ties between mother and child.
Here’s the second movement in a filming that underscores the Holocaust interpretation. It’s an extract from Holocaust – A Music Memorial Film, which was shot in Auschwitz. The soprano is Isabel Bayrakdaraian, and she is accompanied by the Sinfonietta Cracovia, conducted by John Axelrod.
According to the Wikipedia entry for the 3rd Symphony, the text of the second movement is an inscription scrawled on the wall of a cell of a Gestapo prison in the town of Zakopane, in southern Poland. The words were those of 18-year-old Helena Wanda Błażusiakówna, a highland woman incarcerated on 25 September, 1944. It read “O Mamo nie płacz nie—Niebios Przeczysta Królowo Ty zawsze wspieraj mnie” (Oh Mamma do not cry—Immaculate Queen of Heaven support me always).
(hat tip to The Observer for the link to the video)
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The Night Sky
Here’s a stunning time-lapse video made by Stéphane Guisard of the night sky at the Paranal Observatory in Chile. Do watch it at the full 1080p resolution and in fullscreen mode for the best effect. Seriously beautiful. I just wish that the night sky around here was as clear, but alas there’s simply too much light pollution here in the densely populated Netherlands.
(hat tip to The Bad Astronomer)
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My Father, The Bomb and Me
When I was growing up. Jacob Bronowski was a presence on the telly. He was the scientist, the boffin, who could be relied upon to explain science to the rest of us. In 1973, he presented a ground-breaking series, The Ascent of Man, that gave him a platform to present his humanist view of the role that science has played in the development of our species.
The bit that sticks in my mind, that probably sticks in everybody’s mind who saw the series, is the scene where he is ankle-deep in a muddy pool in Auschwitz, and he suddenly bends down to bring up a handful of mud before the camera, while talking to us in that faintly-accented voice of his. Except that this is not mud, this is ash. The ash of millions of human beings who were consumed by the ovens of the Nazis. I can never watch that scene without being overwhelmed.
Last night, I saw that scene again. It was part of a documentary, My Father, The Bomb and Me, presented by the historian Lisa Jardine. She is his daughter, and she explored aspects of his life that she knew little of. For example, the fact that he worked in operations research during WWII, designing more effective bombs, and she wondered how she could reconcile that with the loving father that she remembered.
Her documentary succeeded brilliantly, bringing to life a man who was both humane and who was deeply affected by remorse at some of the things that he had to do in his life. The depth of that remorse was expressed by the simple act of cleaning his glasses in public on a talk show. It sounds ridiculous, but watching his daughter watch the video of that sequence with her seeing the deeper meaning in what he was doing as he carefully sought for the just words to answer the interviewer’s question made everything come clear, and the thought arise, in my mind at least, that here was a good man doing the best he could, as he always had done.
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The Antikythera Mechanism – in Lego
I have mentioned the astounding Antikythera mechanism before, but here’s something really brilliant: it’s been reconstructed using Lego. What I like about the video is that it demonstrates how the various component parts work together and end up as a machine for predicting solar eclipses. Quite wonderful.
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Someone Like You
I’m looking forward to the release of Adele’s next album “21” on the 24th January. That young woman has talent. Here she is singing one of the songs from the forthcoming album.
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The United Nations – A Force For Good?
I hope that the above title is somewhat of a rhetorical question. I would hope that, on balance, despite its many failings, the UN still counts for something in this sorry world.
However, when it gets down to a personal level, I find myself questioning whether the ideals in fact count for very much in the face of politics.
I read two weeks ago Paul Burston’s blog entry where he wrote that he sat down and wept at the news that of the United Nations panel’s decision to remove sexual orientation from an anti-execution resolution. As he said:
The resolution has contained a reference to lesbian and gay people since 1999. Today, it was announced that this has changed. Other groups are still covered, including those facing persecution on the grounds of religion. But not us.
According to Pink News, “the vast majority of countries in support of the change were African or Arabic” – ie, those countries with the worst records on human rights abuses against lesbians and gay men, countries where gay people are regularly stoned, flogged and publicly executed.
What surprised me is that I had not seen even a mention of this on any mainstream news web site (e.g. newspapers and the BBC), so I had hoped that Paul had been mistaken.
But no, it does in fact appear that this has occurred. Here’s the UN record of the meeting.
As William Crawley asks: Does the UN now support the execution of gays?
I take a little comfort from the fact that the UK’s Association of British Muslims has condemned the removal of the reference to sexual orientation in the resolution. That is a statement of support from what will seem a surprising group to many people.
I wrote yesterday that some of us are involved in a war that is not of our choosing. It now seems to me that there are more of us involved than I had at first appreciated.
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The Unchosen War
World AIDS Day was on December 1st. I had the luxury of reflecting on lost friends, since it is my good fortune to be living in the Netherlands.
Some of us reflect on the fact that they are fighting in a war that is not of their making, and that the makers of that war are their fellow countrymen, who are in positions of political and religious power.
Geoff Coupe's Blog 