Relevant History

Greetings from Cafe del Doge

I spent the day with my son, who has had a bad cough and needed a day off. But tonight I had dinner with a colleague, and an topping the night off with a drink at the uber cool Doge. A little time to be a grown up.

Henry Porter on "this putsch against our freedoms"

A while ago I had the good fortune to spend a day with Henry Porter, an English author and political commentator. He was doing a documentary on surveillance technologies, and we talked about RFID; the footage is playing on a cutting-room floor somewhere, but it was still a good time.

Since then, I've been reading his Observer column off and on, and as someone who loves going to England, was really struck by his recent howl over the British government's latest proposals to gather information about travelers.

Welcome to Fortress Britain, a fortress that will keep people in as well as out. Welcome to a state that requires you to answer 53 questions before you're allowed to take a day trip to Calais. Welcome to a country where you will be stopped, scanned and searched at any of 250 railways stations, filmed at every turn, barked at by a police force whose behaviour has given rise to a doubling in complaints concerning abuse and assaults.

Three years ago, this would have seemed hysterical and Home Office ministers would have been writing letters of complaint. But it is a measure of how fast and how far things have gone that it does nothing more than describe the facts as announced last week.

We now accept with apparent equanimity that the state has the right to demand to know, among other things, how your ticket has been paid for, the billing address of any card used, your travel itinerary and route, your email address, details of whether your travel arrangements are flexible, the history of changes to your travel plans plus any biographical information the state deems to be of interest or anything the ticket agent considers to be of interest.

There is no end to Whitehall's information binge. The krill of personal data is being scooped up in ever-increasing quantities by a state that harbours a truly bewildering fear of the free, private and self-determined individual, who may want to take himself off to Paris without someone at home knowing his movements or his credit card number.

[To the tune of Pink Floyd, "The Fletcher Memorial Home," from the album "The Final Cut".]

Technorati Tags: England, politics

Craft fair!

The Peninsula School craft fair is this weekend.

via flickr

My son is quite excited because he's in the chorus, and they get to sing on the front steps of the big building.

[To the tune of Led Zeppelin, "The Rover," from the album "Physical Graffiti".]

Greatest political ad ever?

[via Wonkette]

[To the tune of The Beatles, "A Hard Day's Night," from the album "The Beatles 1".]

Technorati Tags: politics, video

This is everything I love about Singapore

Technorati Tags: Singapore, video

The bathroom so far

Need to finish the back, and do the floors.

New phone is now... a phone

Friday afternoon I took the kids rollerblading at Stanford. On the way home, I stopped at the T-Mobile store and bought a prepaid SIM card for my Nokia N95. Mainly I wanted it so I could get a Fring account, and use the phone for VoIP calls; but I figured it would be nice to be able to use it as a phone if I really needed.

For the last couple years, I've carried around a cellphone, iPod, and digital camera. I don't leave the house without the first and last, and usually I've got all three (plus headphones, obviously). The more I spend time with the thing, the closer I come to believing that under some the right circumstances I could be happy carrying just one device.

Of course, specialized devices are probably always going to be better than combination devices. And as an MP3 player, the Nokia is definitely way behind an iPod: it has a much smaller memory, the sound quality strikes me as a bit below the iPod's (a tiny bit of persistent background hiss), and lacks the ability to handle all the playlists and so forth (not to mention the inability to play music bought from the Apple store). However, I can get a respectable seven hours' music on the 1GB micro SD card, and have loaded it up with songs that I like, but haven't listened to much recently (in smart playlist-speak, fulfilling all of the conditions: not played in the last 14 days, not played more than 30 times, rated with four or five stars, selected at random).

The camera is very good for everyday use, though I notice two issues with it: the latency is quite a bit higher than with my Canon digital camera-- about 7-10 seconds, compared with under 2 for the Canon-- and the night photography isn't nearly as good.

There's also no way to get a wrist strap on the N95, which for me is a significant thing, as for me not putting the wrist strap on leads to disaster.

The thing I'm using it most for is a mobile blogging device: basically, a digital camera with wifi. It's great when I know I want to throw a quick update up on the blog (though just why I want it immediately, I'm not sure), a quick post that I can follow up later. The speed is nice, but I do feel like it comes at a price: while the predictive typing is pretty good, even with it I don't seem to want to write anything longer than a couple sentences-- and obviously I'm not someone who's afraid of long posts. Still, I can imagine than when I'm on the road, it could be a cool thing: if I'd had this in Budapest, for example, I could have pretty much live-blogged every minute of the trip (there's wifi all over the place in Budapest).

Actually, I did do that, because I was carrying around my laptop and cell phone everywhere I went. And since it was a working trip, and I trust my ability to take really good pictures with the Canon, I'm not sure I would have given them up for a single, slightly inferior device-- inferior not so much in technical terms, but in terms of a couple specific performance criteria, and in terms of my ability to use.

I'll see if that changes with next year's travels.

Technorati Tags: blogging, camera, mobility, music, N95, phone

Cat inspection

They still do not like change. But they like the tile.

Technorati Tags: bathroom, renovation

Words to live by

Niccolò Machiavelli to Francesco Vettori, 10 December 1513.

When evening comes, I return home and enter my study; on the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace. Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable courts of the ancients, where, solicitously received by them, I nourish myself on that food that alone is mine and for which I was born; where I am unashamed to converse with them and to question them about the motives for their actions, and they, out of their human kindness, answer me. And for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death. I absorb myself into them completely. And because Dante says that no one understands anything unless he retains what he has understood, I have jotted down what I have profited from in their conversation and composed a short study, De principatibus...

De principatibus, of course, is his masterwork The Prince.

Bathroom remodel progress

We started putting up tile around the shower. After a lot of puzzling over styles, we finally decided on these small, fairly dark blue tiles that come in 5 x 5 sheets, with the tiles attached to what feels like fiberglass tape.

As with any job, a lot of your time is spent in prep-- which means mixing up the cement-like stuff that the tiles go on, masking the tub, and measuring measuring measure-- and in dealing with the exceptions-- which means cutting the tiles that go in the corners and edges.

Fortunately, the back wall is pleasantly close to five feet wide, so we won't have to cut any tile until we get close to the ceiling. The walls were a different story. And of course, we had make a thousand little tiny cuts for the fixtures, in the wall on the left.

The white dots, by the way, are spacers.

We still have to buy the floor tile. That's one of tomorrow's jobs. You wouldn't think glazed white floor tile would be hard to find, but so far we've struck out!

Technorati Tags: bathroom, renovation