A little Question and Answer spot about what’s going on in my life:
Q: Where are you at the moment?
A: I’m currently in Colchester, England.
Q: England? Not in Hong Kong?
A: Nope, something came up.
Q: Do tell…
A: I got given the opportunity to take a one year sabbatical to pursue my dream job.
Q: Dream Job? But I thought your dream job was to become a barrister in Hong Kong, why postpone it?
A: You’re right, but being a barrister is a dream job in the same vein as a merchant banker dreaming of becoming head of JP Morgan. I’m talking about a “I wanna be an astronaut” sort of dream job here.
Q: OK so you’re doing your Dream Job. What is it?
A: I can’t answer that right now, perhaps in a month or so’s time.
Q: What about Hong Kong?
A: I still intend to accrue fat sacks of cash in Hong Kong, sooner rather than later. The Land of the Shiny Green Suit is still my favourite City in the world.
Q: So what does all this mean in the here and now?
A: Well, I ride a bike to work, I wake up each morning looking forward to the day ahead and still end up “Chasing the Yik” in the Hong Kong vernacular.
The site’s redesign might come about when I have the patience for it. Right now I don’t and the preliminary graphics for the old redesign are too HK Centric to really work.
Later
John
I’m in Malta on holiday. Huzzah.
I chose a great day to leave too. Thursday.
After being woken up at 4:30AM to make it to Heathrow in time for the flight, I was less than amused to discover that some angry young men were intent on blowing up a few planes on that morning.
I checked in my hand luggage, which defenestrated the Mac-Addict readathon I had planned for the flight and got to security. A ridiculously tall American guy (who no doubt would be enjoying a 6+ Hour wait for his flight) got to enjoy a full body search before I made it through the scanners and pat-down, he seemed cheerful though and I daresay I was in good spirits myself, despite being a little tired.
All our shoes went through the X-Ray imagers (Richard Reid’s Legacy) and thankfully, since my flight had been in the air from Malta, I got to leave only half an hour behind schedule. Admittedly without anything to read.
So I’ve been here in Malta, enjoying the heat and burning myself. Years out of the sun have turned me into some sort of pale-skinned Brit. Accursed geekery! What hast thou wrought!? I hope to rectify this situation with a more active lifestyle, to be expanded upon at a later date.
Like everyone I hope to see Hezbollah disarmed and defanged in the coming weeks to months but by far the best news I’ve received has been that Sir Simon Jenkins has stopped writing for the Times leaving it with a stable of only superlative writers. The source of the ‘Jenkins rule’ (any position taken by Sir Simon will signal the alternative to be both morally correct and intelligent) is sent up in a few short paragraphs in this excellent Mary Ann Sieghart column.
I’m off to go fetch a Pear Juice from the fridge. Ah, the benefits of being in a Mediterranean country!
Later
John
Some friends of mine brought up the topic of mac gaming and what a coincidence, the very next day Tycho, an undisputed prince of gamers, writes this at Penny Arcade.com.
Transgaming’s Cider product allows Windows games to run on Intel Macs without dual booting or costly and painful waxing. It isn’t emulation exactly, and it does require some devloper cooperation. I’ve been expecting Apple to handle something like this themselves, and they may yet, but perhaps they believe that Boot Camp has it under control. I sometimes, even in our enlightened age, see snark merchants snickering about the dilapidated state of Mac gaming. This was in a post I was reading on my Mac, booted into Windows, right before I played the demo of Prey with no hitches the very day of its release. I don’t know if there is this storehouse of tired-ass Mac jokes out there that have no defined use, or what, but we’re way past the expiration date on that type of material.
Macs win. I personally have to fire up Virtual PC for Magic the Gathering online and the principle is the same for DirectX-heavy games on the newer macs.
The fact is, like all mac users in this position, Tycho reboots into OS X when he wants to use his computer for everything else. Cider may very well be the means of cutting that last tether to the bloated eye-raping commonly known as the Windows operating system.
How funny it is to see the transformation of Penny Arcade from a comic featuring “Chuck” the strawman, to “Charles” the supporting cast member to the eventual assimilation of both main characters. With WWDC coming up things are looking very nice as a mac user.
Later
John
The full text of Tony Blair’s speech to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council
Here’s the best part:
What is happening today out in the Middle East, in Afghanistan and beyond is an elemental struggle about the values that will shape our future.
It is in part a struggle between what I will call Reactionary Islam and Moderate, Mainstream Islam. But its implications go far wider. We are fighting a war, but not just against terrorism but about how the world should govern itself in the early 21st century, about global values.
The root causes of the current crisis are supremely indicative of this. Ever since September 11th, the US has embarked on a policy of intervention in order to protect its and our future security. Hence Afghanistan. Hence Iraq. Hence the broader Middle East initiative in support of moves towards democracy in the Arab world. The point about these interventions, however, military and otherwise, is that they were not just about changing regimes but changing the values systems governing the nations concerned. The banner was not actually “regime change” it was “values change”.
What we have done therefore in intervening in this way, is far more momentous than possibly we appreciated at the time.
Of course the fanatics, attached to a completely wrong and reactionary view of Islam, had been engaging in terrorism for years before September 11th. In Chechnya, in India and Pakistan, in Algeria, in many other Muslim countries, atrocities were occurring. But we did not feel the impact directly. So we were not bending our eye or our will to it as we should have. We had barely heard of the Taleban. We rather inclined to the view that where there was terrorism, perhaps it was partly the fault of the governments of the countries concerned.
We were in error. In fact, these acts of terrorism were not isolated incidents. They were part of a growing movement. A movement that believed Muslims had departed from their proper faith, were being taken over by Western culture, were being governed treacherously by Muslims complicit in this take-over, whereas the true way to recover not just the true faith, but Muslim confidence and self esteem, was to take on the West and all its works.
Sometimes political strategy comes deliberatively, sometimes by instinct. For this movement, it was probably by instinct. It has an ideology, a world-view, it has deep convictions and the determination of the fanatic. It resembles in many ways early revolutionary Communism. It doesn’t always need structures and command centres or even explicit communication. It knows what it thinks.
Its strategy in the late 1990s became clear. If they were merely fighting with Islam, they ran the risk that fellow Muslims - being as decent and fair-minded as anyone else - would choose to reject their fanaticism. A battle about Islam was just Muslim versus Muslim. They realised they had to create a completely different battle in Muslim minds: Muslim versus Western.
This is what September 11th did. Still now, I am amazed at how many people will say, in effect, there is increased terrorism today because we invaded Afghanistan and Iraq. They seem to forget entirely that September 11th predated either. The West didn’t attack this movement. We were attacked. Until then we had largely ignored it.
The reason I say our response was even more momentous than it seemed at the time, is this. We could have chosen security as the battleground. But we didn’t. We chose values. We said we didn’t want another Taleban or a different Saddam. Rightly, in my view, we realised that you can’t defeat a fanatical ideology just by imprisoning or killing its leaders; you have to defeat its ideas.
Read it all if you get the chance, just when I was feeling like all hope was lost, Mr Blair reminds me of why shying away from the problem will never work.
Later
John.
Rather perilous time not to be blogging eh?
Israel prosecutes a war against a stateless terrorist organization, the usual suspects line up to criticize and demonize.
The problem is, you can’t beat Hezbollah if you play by the rules, because they don’t themselves.
Israel bombs an area where Rockets were fired from, civilians die. Why? Because that’s where the rockets are. Apparently you strap a few civilians to your launchers your opponents are at fault when they die. AA Gun Turret? The correct placement for that artillery platform is in the courtyard next to the barbeque and the paddling pool.
Israel cannot continue its assault on Hezbollah and the international community are utterly unwilling to put the group to the sword themselves. The west’s own morality loses us this fight.
Yes that’s right Morality, we’re better. Shove that in your pipe and smoke it hippy.
When Lebanese civilians die, we mourn, when Israeli civilians die it’s mission accomplished for Hezbollah - party in the Arab street. There’s no answer to that.
It’s so hard to be PC when in reality all you want to do is seal up the borders around the Caliphate-mongering 13th century dropouts and leave them to their wretched lives of technological obsolescence and homosexual killing.
Pull out and leave the Lebanese to their new Islamofascist overlords. The UN abandoned that nation long ago when no one stepped forward to help disarm and dismantle Hezbollah. The Lebanese themselves let Hezbollah take root, stand in Parliament and begin the slow transmogrification of nation into death cult.
This is what we reap when we do nothing. Now the weed is too large to be uprooted.
Sorry for the pessimism.
Later
John