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Pointless Censorship

A dictionary has been censored by Apple prior to its acceptance on the app store. Not only have unambiguously rude words been removed; words like ‘screw’, ‘snatch’ and ‘ass’ have been purged too.  Whoever made that decision is a cock.  It’s a type of bird, you know, although the bird is apparently extinct by Apple’s request.

Personally I have no problem with rude words.  If your child can’t get them on your phone then they’ll underline them in a paper dictionary instead.  Maybe Apple are trying to protect me.  I’m grateful.  Really I am.  I shall send over my copy of Rogers Profanisaurus without delay so that they can censor that too.

I do have a problem with all the gun simulators on the app store though.  A rude word has never resulted in injury to another – but guns kill hundreds, if not thousands, of people around the world every day.  Surely that is more offensive?

To quote South Park it seems that “Horrific, deplorable violence is okay, as long as people don’t say any naughty words.”

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Fear and Trembling

As every good reviewer knows, one should never judge a book by its cover.  If one were to ignore that rule then the Penguin Great Ideas edition of Fear and Trembling by Søren Kierkegaard would garner the highest praise.  The cover design of slightly embossed text is plain but beautiful and, unlike many publishers these days, Penguin employs typesetters who understand the importance of ligatures.  This is a book that feels wonderful and is a joy to look at.

No, one should never judge a book by its cover.  The only sound way to review a book is by its smell.  Open it up and bury your nose in its pristine pages – only then will you truly know whether the book in your hand is worth a second glance.  A book may have many smells: knowledge, excitement, adventure, romance, paper, ink and glue.  Mainly paper, ink and glue I concede.  Try it for yourself.  Grab your favourite novel and, lets say, the Microsoft Windows user manual.  The Windows manual will probably have you reaching for a bucket – which is entirely appropriate considering the subject matter.  Fear & Trembling, on the other hand, smells unexciting but mind expanding which I put down to the high solvent content of its raw material.

I mentioned earlier that Fear and Trembling is a joy to look at.  It isn’t, however, a joy to read.  That isn’t to say that it’s not interesting – but it is a bit of a headful and it’ll take longer to read than its diminutive 152 pages suggest.  I’m a fast reader, I can polish off the Lord of the Rings in a week (although I admit that I do tend to skip the dire poetry and the boring battles, which helps).  It took me the same amount of time to read Fear and Trembling, because I’d reach the end of a section and, realising that I hadn’t fully grasped the concepts, have to reread it.  If you have no interest in philosophy and theology then you probably won’t want to put the necessary effort in and if, like me, you’re an amateur in the field then you’d be better off dipping into it rather than reading it in one go.

It’s a dangerous book too, because it doesn’t present a cut-and-dried philosophy for the reader to accept or ignore.  It retells and then dismantles the biblical story of Abraham and Isaac, subjecting it to the kind of forensic analysis that’ll boil the blood of any dyed in the wool ‘it’s in the Bible so it must be true’ zealot.  It considers whether Abraham’s faith was justified and whether or not he was on ethically sound ground.  There are people who attempt filicide today, claiming that their offspring are demonically possessed or that they were acting under orders from God.  We, rightly, lock them up for the loonies that they are, but how are they any different from Abraham?  Of course, the Bible, and the Old Testament in particular, is full of nasty, violent, prejudiced and contradictory claptrap.  The intelligent mind questions it and excises the poison from the basic worthwhile message, but one can understand how the socio and psychopathically inclined (think of Alex from A Clockwork Orange or any number of real life cult leaders) are drawn to it like flies to rotting meat.  All Kierkegaard does is shine a light on this paradox.  According to Kierkegaard, Abraham chooses faith (do as God says, unquestioningly) over morals (thou shalt not kill).  In doing so, Abraham surrenders free choice and becomes an automaton for another Mind.  Even today, there are zealots in every creed who claim that, like Abraham, their faith is the most important thing in their lives.  Like Kierkegaard I’d argue that they are dangerous and that the world would be better if they lived their lives morally instead.  A truly faithful person can abdicate responsibility for their actions and commit the most appalling atrocities.

I’ve long believed that one should never accept only one point of view and that everything should be questioned – and Kierkegaard goes far beyond my own limited enquiries.  Fear and Trembling should be read by anyone, of any faith, who claims to have any interest, however limited, in religion.  It is not an easy read but, if nothing else, it’s laid out nicely and it smells quite pleasant.

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Wonderful AppleTV

With a son in the first few months of his life, the time that my wife and I spent going to the cinema has been sadly curtailed.  I don’t like renting DVDs, partly because I hate sitting through adverts for films have no intention of watching, and partly because I hate being told that Piracy Is A Crime.  Every. Bloody. Time.  A patronising message which is made more irritating by the fact that if I had pirated the damn film I wouldn’t have to watch the message or umpteen adverts.

So, at the risk of sounding like a cheap radio commercial, I was delighted to discover that rentals and purchases from the iTunes store are not only reasonably priced but also free from annoyance.  You pay.  You watch.  You aren’t forced to sit through crap.

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Slender Booby

One thing that the nature documentaries fail to cover is quite how bad the Galapagos islands smell. There’s no doubt that the Galapagos are a little slice of paradise, but they’re the slice that smells of faeces mixed with stale anchovy paste.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Sarah and I honeymooned late, in fact we left it until January this year. It is with a little sadness that I write these words because I’m fairly sure that we will never again have such a wonderful holiday or see such amazing things. We were, for example, transported back in time to the 1970s as soon as we stepped onto Iberia’s rickety old Airbus. It’s been a very long time since I saw so much brown in one place (other, of course, than my wardrobe). There was no choice of film and, quite apart from the fact that the actors were all speaking Spanish, the nearest screen was too far away to be of any use to us. So we contented ourselves with the worryingly easy task of removing bits of trim from the aircraft.

By some miracle we landed safely at our destination – Quito, a picturesque town which was constructed little better than the aeroplane which conveyed us there. We didn’t let that stop us though and even Pascal scrabbled up the scaffolding to reach the highest room of the tallest tower of the basilica to be with his one true love. Let me be quite clear here. Sarah and I both have vertigo in peculiarly different ways. Pascal is quite happy with trees and cliffs, certain as he is that if nature constructed them then they can probably be trusted to stay standing. Sarah doesn’t trust nature at all and would rather put her life in the hands of an overweight chain-smoker who wears the wrong sized trousers and shouts ‘Phwoar! Bristols!’ at every girl who walks past the building site. Both, of course, trust gliders – but that’s just a matter of physics.

After a day or two of exploration we jetted off to the Amazon rain-forest to swim with piranhas, anacondas, caymans and all manner of betoothed beasties. We acquainted ourselves with insects and spiders which only seemed to come in large and enormous sizes. And we witnessed monkeys crashing through the trees, much to the annoyance of the owls and vampire bats. The lodge, of course, was beautiful and the food excellent.

The rain-forest was swiftly followed by the even-rainier-forest, a land of frogs, millipedes and humming birds. Actually, it seemed to be a paradise for twitchers – but there was only one bird that I was really interested in watching. The even-rainier-forest also provided us with our only encounter with Incan ruins.

Nearly five kilometres above sea-level the air cannot be described as rich in oxygen. We struggled up the slopes of Cotopaxi, burning nicely in the sun, whilst being guided by a mountain goat Amerindian woman. I’m afraid to say that I took advantage of Sarah’s breathlessness to hurl snowballs at her. Snowball fight on the equator! You’d think it’d be great, right? Wrong, alas. The snow was like powder. Never mind, we both made up for lost time when it snowed in London in April – and we made anatomically gifted snowmen and women. Having decided that the islands themselves were far too smelly, we toured the Galapagos in a sailing boat. We went ashore regularly for walks with iguana, sea-lions (the cause of most of the stink) and boobies. We swam with iguana, sea-lions, turtles, sharks and, of course, boobies. The boobies were most impressive and, as has been commented on in the past, I’m rather fond of them.

The first move of 2008 was from Sarah’s flat in the increasingly stabby south-east of London, but not before Pascal upset one of the neighbours by shouting at her. We moved to a little house in Hertford and immediately set about the task of trying to find somewhere to buy. It was during our stay in the noisy little house that we found the time to unpack the modelling kit and make a little Waggle. Waggle is currently baking, and we expect hir (him’n’her, alright!? Really! Mi spellin int vat bad!) to be complete in March. Ish.

Having honeymooned so extravagantly in January, we decided that our summer holiday should be spent in the U.K., in Cornwall. We camped and it rained. The tent leaked so we patched it up with old bin-bags – it was a veritable tramp palace by the time we decided to donate it to the Eden project for recycling. We will camp again, we promise, but our tent will be bigger, sturdier and more expensive next time! And, dudes, I learned to surf. I caught the waves and stayed on my feet all the way to the beach. Excellent fun, party on – I want to do that again. Any day now I’ll be peroxiding my hair, growing it long, and moving in to a VW camper van. Poor Sarah, waggled up as she is, could only watch and take photographs as she got shot blasted with hail. The holiday was a lot of fun though, and the weather was miraculously fine when we went to see War of the Worlds at the Minack theatre.

We found the house we wanted in Ware and made the necessary arrangements to be seriously inconvenienced and pissed about by the mortgage company. Which they duly did. So well done to C&G – I don’t think that you missed a single opportunity to mess us about. Thankfully, we were assisted by a supremely competent solicitor. Since then we’ve been nesting – mainly lining the nest with books, I think. Our kitchen is almost finished, although I still need to sort out the under-stairs cupboard. Our living room is almost finished, although the floor needs finishing. And our bedroom will be finished once we’ve slapped some paint on the walls and I’ve papered and painted the hoofysaurus cupboard. Then we can get to work on Waggle’s room.

It’s been a busy year. Busy and fun. We’ve been to paradise, sold a flat and bought a house, and we are expecting our first child. I have a sneaky feeling that 2009 will be even more eventful.

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Public Transport

Let’s get the positive stuff out of the way first. I like trains, provided that I can get a seat.  I especially like long train journeys in first class – I get a reasonable cup of tea, a fairly peaceful journey and I can read the paper.

I hate the underground.  It’s smelly, stifling and there’s nothing to look at except for the armpits of ones fellow travellers as they grasp the hand rails (there’s never room to sit).

I hate buses but, since I live beyond the reach of the underground, they’re a necessary nuisance.  I particularly dislike many of my fellow passengers and, in particular, the spineless wimps who put up with hooliganism meekly – or, worse yet, thank me when I don’t.

Strangely enough, I don’t particularly hate the inconsiderate ‘yoofs’ who do so much to ensure that bus rides are as unpleasant as possible.  I was yoofish once and, whilst I never graffitied or listened to my music at disturbing volumes (mainly because I didn’t have the means), I’m aware that I was probably quite unpleasant in my own way.

No, I hate the spineless wimps who won’t stand up for peace, quiet and good manners.  Their excuse is inevitably that they don’t want to get stabbed or happyslapped.  What?  And I do?  I’m hardly built like a boxer myself – I’m in no position to defend myself from a knife or, worse, a gun.  The difference is that I have a healthy sense of perspective and I realise that the chances of being attacked are tiny.  Let’s face it, if they weren’t then such attacks would cease to be newsworthy. The streets will, I promise you, be far safer when everybody firmly (but politely) learns to say ‘excuse me, but would you please stop doing that (whatever it is)’.  Trust me. It works. But if you see me doing it and you’re grateful, please don’t thank me. Just remember not to be so much of a coward yourself next time.

Most of all though, I hate Ken Livingstone for giving free travel to yoofs – come on.  Make them pay like everybody else, and put the extra revenue into paying conductors – life will be so much more pleasant for everyone who has to use public transport.

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Dear Steve

You confess to having brainwashed your children. Nice.  It won’t work, of course.  Children are independent and they’ll do as they damn well please.  You can’t even stop them from doing something that might harm them later (like drugs for example), so banning them from using products and services (like the iPod and Google) which are way better than anything from Microsoft is somewhat risible.

Of course, whether or not brainwashing works, a better solution would be for Microsoft to pick up the gauntlet thrown down by Apple and Google.  If Microsoft can make a better product than its competitors then its competitors will go out of business – after all, who would buy a product from a small company if the big one can do the job at least as well?  I’m not even thinking of search engines or music players any more.  I’m thinking of an operating system – Mac OS X (which you have doubtless also banned your children from using).

Windows is a leviathan.  It commands so much market share that anyone buying a computer would be foolish not to buy Windows – unless there was a competitor at least twice as good.  After all, you’d need a damn good reason to throw away compatibility with the world’s most used OS.  Windows has two such competitors.  My favourite is Mac OS X and its feature set goes way beyond Vista but without the precipitous hardware requirements.  Of course, Mac OS X requires you to have a computer made by Apple – but since you’ll probably need a new computer to run Vista anyway, it’s worth considering.

Some people claim that they don’t want to be locked in to a hardware manufacturer (as if being locked into an operating system is any better).  Okay, I can sort of understand that.  I run Ubuntu on my PC.  I find that it’s far more capable than Windows, more secure and (at least as far as I’m concerned) easier to use.  It looks nicer too, to my eyes, and it’ll run on virtually any computer.  It’s free too.

Some people will still object that they need to run Windows programs.  In most instances, of course, they don’t need to.  Open Office is Microsoft Office compatible (and free too), and there are many other applications that can be used in lieu of those written by Microsoft.  On those rare occasions that a Windows program is required, Crossover will run Windows programs natively on either Mac OS or Linux.

So come on Steve, give me one good reason why your kids – or anyone else for that matter – should use Microsoft products? Oh, and ‘because it’s your company’ isn’t a good enough reason!

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Monopoly

Strange as it may seem, I think that Microsoft is being unfairly treated when it’s asked to unbundle parts of Windows in order to comply with European monopoly law.  How would we, as Mac users, feel if the next version of Mac OS X contained no compression software, no web browser, no DVD player or even Quicktime?

That isn’t to say that Microsoft shouldn’t be slapped down firmly for being monopolistic, but the E.U. lawyers should work out exactly why Windows has a monopoly.  It has a monopoly because important bundled applications or frameworks – like Windows Media Player, .Net etc. only work on Windows and on no other platform.  Similarly, the forthcoming Zune will work only with Windows computers.

iPod may currently be dominant, but it isn’t a monopoly because it will work just as well on Windows as it does on the Mac.  Quicktime works exactly the same on Windows as it does on the Mac – DRM and all. Mac OS isn’t a monopoly because, even though it only works on Apple hardware, it doesn’t lock the user into using a particular operating system to use the files it generates.

I sincerely hope that the E.U. spots Zune and forces Microsoft to make it work with the Mac – DRM and all, or forbids its sale.

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Dear Jacques

This is an open letter of thanks to Jacques Chirac. I publish it here so that the good people of the world can see for themselves how indebted I feel towards him.  If you can’t remember this particular storm in a teacup, you can read the story here – How Jacques lost the Finnish vote for France.

English Version

Dear Jacques,

Thank you for your kind comments about the English, our cuisine and our trustworthiness that you made on Sunday.  Many of the more excitable newspapers in this country lambasted you for it, but I saw greatness in those words.  Who but a genius, a true lover of all Englishness, a man such as yourself, would commit political suicide and hand the glory of the Olympics to a rival nation?  In your infinite wisdom, you scuppered the Paris bid and handed the honour to London.

I have always been a Francophile, but now I am greatly in your debt as well (although I am quite untrustworthy, so I have no intention of paying up). You will always be welcome at my home, where I will be delighted to feed you stodgy stews and ready meals purchased from one of our many fine supermarkets.

Yours sincerely,

Pascal

French Version

Cher Jacques,

Je vous remercie des aimables commentaires que vous avez passé dimanche dernier sur les Anglais, notre cuisine et notre fiabilité. Un grand nombre de nos journaux plus susceptibles vous ont raillé pour cela mais j’ai vu une certaine grandeur dans vos paroles. Qui d’autre qu’un génie, un véritable admirateur de toute anglicité, un homme comme vous, commettrait un suicide politique et passerait la gloire d’obtenir les Jeux Olympiques à un pays rival ? Dans votre sagesse infinie, vous êtes arrivé à torpiller les chances de Paris et passer un tel  honneur à Londres.

J’ai toujours été un francophile, mais maintenant je vous suis aussi tout à fait endetté (bien que je sois peu fiable et n’aie donc aucune intention de payer). Vous serez toujours le bienvenu chez moi où j’aurai grand plaisir à vous offrir des ragoûts bourratifs et des repas tous préparés, achetés dans l’un de nos excellents supermarchés.

Veuillez agréer, cher Jacques, mes sincères salutations,

Pascal

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Boot Camp

Deep down, in the depths of my soul, I’m a luddite.  I didn’t like PowerPC when Apple first unleashed that on the world.  I was cold about the shift from NuBus.  OS X seemed to be a disaster. On all these counts, I was wrong.  Apple knew what it was doing, although I’m still not convinced by the switch to Intel.

This time though, I’m certain that an own goal has been scored.  Boot Camp, the technology that allows Mac’s to boot Windows, has to be a bad idea.

If a Windows user buys a Mac and then uses it to run Windows, why should they ever learn to use and love the Mac? If a Mac can run Windows Photoshop, why should Adobe bother to develop an Intel native version of Mac Photoshop?  Why should any developer
develop for Intel Mac? Finally, Apple is a hardware company that just happens to write an operating system.  If fewer people are using its OS, why should bother to spend all that money on continuing development?

I’ve been proved wrong in the past.  I’m not visionary enough to see the wisdom of Apple’s manoeverings.  But I wish they’d stop scaring me and right now I’ve got a sense of impending doom about this.