Eastern Redridge

Level 24

We mostly stuck around Redridge to clean up some quests. We took down Yowler (who is basically no more than a level-20 version of the level-11 Hogger), took magical orbs from Shadowcasters and pendants from Gnolls, and in the process I think we've explored most of the northeast corner of Redridge. With the combined XP from the quests we were able to hit Level 24, so it was off to Stormwind again for Mage and Rogue training and to auction off some of the better gear we'd picked up.

Again the Mage training cost just about all the cash I'd made, but at least I now have a much more powerful Fireball and a reduction in the cooldown time on Fire Blast, among other things. Together with the increased health and mana that comes with the level-up, I think we're now truly ready for the Deadmines - Rhahk'Zor is just an NPC and therefore it's impossible to really hate him, but I want to get past him and my upgraded fire spells should help leave the fat bugger crispy-fried. In the meantime we still have three or four quests outstanding in Redridge. Which to do first... we'll figure that out later.

I also got Teleport training, meaning that (with the help of a Rune of Teleportation) I can get back to Stormwind in a hurry from wherever I happen to be - probably something I'd only do in an emergency since it only works on me and Kate would be left behind, and in any case the runes aren't cheap. (Later I should get the Portal skill, which will allow us to travel together.)

The auctions seem to have been helping with the money, although it's often disappointing when a very basic item such as a gem sells and yet an item of 'green' armour or a weapon fails to get bids. I'd need to keep accounts to see how things are really working out but I'm fairly sure that overall I'm making more money on sales than I'm losing with lost deposits. At the moment I've got five items up, including a Claymore I picked up from a Gnoll that I expect to sell well, and a gem that I can't recall where I got.

Note to self: repay Kate the 25 silver she gave me, and the cost of a rune, when I'd spent all my cash on training and reagents. Plus interest.

Kate keeps getting ahead of me on XP even though we're grouped. It doesn't really bother me other than that I like it better when we're tracking each other on levels. In any case, I think I know why this is happening; originally I'd assumed that XP was split evenly among group members, but I'm beginning to think that what really happens is that the XP is portioned according to how much damage each group member does. So if a mob has 1000 hit points, I do 400 damage and Kate deals out the other 600, then she gets 60% of the XP and I get 40%. This is definitely possible because as a Rogue, Kate's character deals out damage faster than my Mage can. Another possibility is that the group member that finishes a fight gets a bigger share of the XP - and again this would explain it because Kate finishes the fights more often than I do. I think WoWWiki has a section about the detailed game mechanics, so I may do a little research about groups and XP.

Reality

Regular readers (Sid and Doris Bonkers of Epping) will have noticed that this has turned into a World of Warcraft blog, since I've written about nothing else for the last week or more. The plain reason is that (1) I want to write, but (2) I don't feel much like writing about what I'm doing at work (boring to the n^th degree) or stuff that upsets or depresses me. That's not to say that there's nothing good going on - there are plenty of good things but in many cases those things are too personal for a blog, or involve Kate who may not want these things made public, or for other reasons are just not suitable blog material.

So for the foreseeable future the major subject of the posts here will be our adventures in Azeroth - something that's fun and easy to write about, hurts nobody, and may be a useful reference for ourselves or others.

Idle time

How is it possible to be busy and idle at the same time?

To find the answer to that question, get a Government job. I'm working on a very important and urgent job involving setting up a system of eight servers and getting all the applications installed and configured, and I've got less than a week to get it all done. And here I am blogging, because I can't do anything more until certain people get certain paperwork done and get back to me. Frustrating.

More WoW

We got a bit further last night - completed four or five quests, got a couple of levels (we're both level 10 now), learned a few skills (in my case fishing, cooking, tailoring and enchantment). Not much in the way of exploring, although we did find the East-something logging camp (we were actually very close to it before, but just didn't know it).

We have another quest to finish up at the logging camp and that'll probably lead to exploring the rest of the south-eastern corner of the area we're in, and while we're on our way back there I want to stop at the Tower of Azora to pick up some supplies. I know there are also another couple of quests waiting in the area near the mine south of Goldshire, so we'll probably swing over that way on our way back west. After that we have at least two quests waiting for us in the Westfall, which will probably lead to more quests around there and I suspect a couple more levels, then it's off to the capital, Stormwind.

I suspect it'll take us more than a couple of hours to do all that, but I'm really curious about what Stormwind will be like and I can't wait to get there - I know it sounds silly (it's just a game, after all) but it's like the virtual equivalent of going to visit London when the biggest place you've ever seen is Nowheresville-in-the-Marsh (population 2). It promises to be very interesting.

Writing time - for the first time in months

How the time flies...

For the first time in months I've actually got some time to breathe and post something. Here's a sample of what's been going on - this should give an idea of why I've been too busy to post.

First, I changed offices. I was working in a company office about 16 miles from home; now I work in a government office 60 miles from home - and because it's a government office and a government computer I'm a bit limited on what I can do. For example, I don't have admin permission on this computer, so I can't install all the software I really need to do my job (I'm writing this with WordPad, fer chrissake, because I can't even install NoteTab so I don't have a decent text editor). Many web sites are blocked, some for no logical reason that I can figure out - there are even pages on Wikipedia I can't get to - so I often have problems reading reference material. C'est la Vie, I suppose.

Second, we moved house. The bastard that owned our old house decided to sell it and, humanitarian that he is, gave us a bit more than a month to move out. (Message for old landlord: if you're reading this, you know who you are, and you're a moneygrubbing c*nt; if this was Europe you'd be in a jail cell by now.)

Then back on the work front I've been swamped with project work. Today, for a change, I'm actually at a place where alll of the projects I'm involved with are stalled for various reasons.

So possibly for the rest of today I actually have the time to write something... watch this space, there may be more coming soon.

I have touched the Titanic...

...and the Titanic has touched me

Sunday evening, we went to Denver Museum of Nature and Science to see Titanic: The Artifact Exhibition. This is a fascinating show. We wandered around the display cases for almost two hours and it seemed like thirty minutes.

There are hundreds of items on display that were recovered from the sea bed; many are simple shipboard items like plates, glasses and decorated window frames, but there are also a lot of personal items such as hand mirrors, combs, razors, spectacles, purses, suitcases and clothes. Quite a few of the personal items were identified as belonging to specific passengers.

There are also pieces of the ship itself, including a small section of the hull inside a case with hole and a sign inviting you to touch. I did. It felt a bit strange, touching a piece of metal that had been associated with 1500 lives and sat under a couple of miles of water for something like eighty years.

The conditions down there do odd things. The pressure is around three tons per square inch, and the seafloor silt has a pH of about 5, which I think makes it about as acidic as vinegar. Cast iron items that have been under that pressure for so long explode when they're brought up to the surface and a lot of materials simply crumble. It's incredible that anything survived to be recovered, and yet even paper items such as banknotes, letters and envelopes have been found. All the same, things are eroding and won't be around forever. Glass and ceramics break down, metals corrode; the ship itself is being slowly eaten by iron-consuming microbes. In the end everything will turn to dust and be carried away by the current.

Here's a tricky question: Bob Ballard, who discovered the wreck in 1985, considered it a grave site and said nothing should be touched - something I agreed with at the time. I was saddened when others went down with the intention of recovering things. But Kate asked me if a few of my belongings in a display case in museum was how I'd choose to be remembered, and that got me thinking. My first reaction was that at least it's better than vanishing without a trace; at least there's something left. No, it wouldn't be my choice - but if the only choice is between being remembered that way and being wiped off the planet as if I'd never existed, I'll take the first option.

So who's right? Should the site be considered sacred and untouchable, or is it better to recover personal belongings? There's no easy answer. My own opinion has changed; I don't think Bob Ballard is 100% right on this any more.

I agree that it should be considered a grave site and treated with the appropriate respect. I'd hate to see somebody trying to make a fast buck by yanking things out of there, packaging them and selling them as product.

On the other hand leaving everything untouched is, in my opinion, also not the right thing to do. Grave sites serve as memorials, too - and what's the point of a memorial that nobody can visit, and that's slowly being eroded to nothing? Better, I think, to recover the things that can be recovered, restore them and identify the owners as far as possible, and put them somewhere up here on land where everyone can see them and give thought to what happened that night in 1912.

I know not everyone will agree with me. As I said, it's a complex and emotional question and not one that can be answered by logic alone; probably the only people who have a right to make the decision are the relatives of those that died. But having seen the exhibition I've given this quite a bit of thought and I think it's a question that needs an answer.

Who Killed Diana?

Some People Still Just Don't Get It

All day yesterday We TV showed programmes about the British Royal Family. I think we watched every one; there was a rather interesting one about Princes William and Harry, another about the seventy-nine dresses auctioned off by Di just two months before her tragic accident, and a really interesting one where Royal Chef Graham Newbould told us all about the Royals' favourite eats. For example, no fish'n'chips in Buck House; instead it's Haddock St. Germaine - small haddock fillets in breadcrumbs, fan-fried to a yummy light gold and served with tiny french fries and bearnaise (or was it hollandaise? Not sure now). It looked so good I want to try it.

However the jewel in the crown was a show called Who Killed Diana?. Now at first I thought this was going to be yet another mash of idiot theories and irrelevant questions pandering to the conspiracy crowd that want to believe Diana was murdered. I was pleasantly surprised, because instead they addressed most if not all of the 'facts' that the conspiracy theorists put forward to make their case, and pretty well shredded them. They also let the conspiracy theorists state their case without ridiculing them, so they can't say they didn't get a fair crack. In fact, the theorists pretty well hanged themselves, as I saw it, because when seen in the harsh light of day their arguments come across as forced at best, and often downright fabrication.

As an example, let's mention Henri Paul and the level of alcohol in his blood. One theorist said that he didn't look drunk on the Ritz's security videos, therefore he wasn't drunk; the blood samples must have been switched. However, it turns out that the morgue has rigorous controls that made any such switch impossible, and further, there were two sets of tests run. So our theorist now changes tack and mentions experiments that showed that the internal organs of people involved in severe accidents undergo physical stresses that result in the production of alcohol. Now, this struck me as a case of "new information that I just thought of" syndrome, since (1) I've never heard of this one before and (2) if it were true, the cops would be writing off every bad car wreck as drink-related since everyone involved would look like they'd just shifted a pint of gin.

Some people who put forward whacky theories do it for book sales and TV spots; they don't really believe what they're saying. That guy (unfortunately I didn't catch his name) struck me as one of these.

I really don't think this applies to the other expert conspiracy theorist - none other than David Icke, ex-footballer, ex-TV sports presenter and author of something like twenty books telling us all about how the world is governed by Reptoids - reptilian aliens from a planet in the constellation Draco, and their reptile/human hybrids. The Queen Mother was a Reptoid, Icke says, and so is 'president' George Bush. According to Icke, Diana was murdered on orders from "higher powers with their own agenda", by which I think we can take to mean the Reptoid Illuminati. Now, to be fair, Icke didn't state this explicitly and the program makers didn't go out of their way to mention his books or ideas, which I think was the right thing to do. But if you don't believe me take a look at the Wikipedia entry I linked on Icke's name, or read/listen to Skeptoid.com podcast episode 46, "Support Your Local Reptoid", or perhaps better still take a look at Icke's own web site for some idea of where his head is. I get the impression that Icke honestly believes this stuff, in which case I think he needs a good long rest in one of those special hotels where the walls are soft and you eat with your fingers.

At the end of the day you have to ask the question: could such a conspiracy involving the Royal Family and their staff, MI6, the French authorities in Paris, the French news media, the British new media, and who knows who else... could such a conspiracy be kept secret by every single person involved for TEN YEARS without someone saying something, when just one person giving an interview with the papers would make millions?

A Ripping Yarn

Shackleton

The other day we watched Shackleton, a dramatized version of Ernest Shackleton's expedition to cross the Antarctic. Although a dramatized version, the script was based on the diaries and first-person accounts of the explorers and so it's very close to what actually happened.

The story didn't need any dressing up to make it more exciting - it's incredible enough as it is. I knew something about the expedition - that the ship, the Endurance, became trapped in the ice for several months before finally being crushed - but that was about all. I didn't really appreciate the true story of what happened.

The Endurance was stuck for nine months before being destroyed. Shackleton and his men, twenty-eight in all, pulled three large boats for weeks across very rough ice. The ice was drifting north and when it finally broke up around them they took to the boats, spending a week in freezing conditions before landing at Elephant Island.

Shackleton knew that the chances of rescue from Elephant Island were very slim, so he and five other men took one of the boats, improved it by raising the sides and putting a deck across it, and sailed it over 800 miles to South Georgia - a two-week journey and an incredible feat of navigation given that the seas they crossed are known to be among the worst in the world and that Frank Worsley, the navigator, was only able to get four navigation readings.

If that wasn't bad enough, the six men survived a storm at sea that sank a 500-ton steamer then landed on the "wrong" side of South Georgia - so Shackleton and two others had to climb over an uncharted mountain range to reach a Whaling station on the other side of the island.

It took Shackleton four attempts and four more months to return to Elephant Island to rescue the rest of his men, and at the end of that not one of the original twenty-eight had died.

Real boys-own-paper stuff.

Snow, Ice and Gorgons

Snow and ice

We had our first real blast of snow the other night. I didn't really believe the forecast, because when I read it in the early part of the afternoon it was a warm, sunny day. Not long after I got home, though, I looked out of the window toward the west and saw some really nasty looking dark grey clouds between us and the mountains. Then up came the wind and down came the snow. This will be lesson on how quickly the weather can change from spring-like to arctic conditions in a matter of minutes - something to remember whenever we decide to take a trip to the mountains.

Yesterday morning the ground was covered with a white layer - as luck would have it the wind had kept the roads clear so getting to work wasn't a problem. In any case it had all pretty much evaporated by lunchtime. Then my boss told me that the "little bit" that we'd had was just part of a storm system stretching all the way to the Texas panhandle - some people had been killed.

It started up again yesterday afternoon, about the time I left the office. The driving conditions weren't great because the wind was blowing strongly from the north while I was driving east along a very exposed road. The snow was falling horizontally from left to right, and more than once a gust hit the car hard enough that I felt myself being pushed southward - i.e. in danger of going off the road and into some farmer's field. After what my boss had said, I admit to feeling a little worried.

It must have stayed pretty cold overnight because this morning there was crunchy ice on the driveway and some big, evil patches of ice on the road all along the four or five miles up to the freeway. Hopefully they'll have melted away before I leave today. The forecast says there's a chance of more snow later then it's supposed to be sunny and warm over the weekend... but I've already been warned to be ready for more snow.

I think I need to look into trading in the car for a Jeep...

Meanwhile in mythical ancient Greece...

Kate and I are both finding Titan Quest more than a little addictive. Kate was having trouble getting past three Gorgons in the Pythian Caves, until we found some information hinting that one of the Gorgons used magic to restore the health of the other two while you're fighting them. All we had to do was figure out which one; Kate was able to send that one down for the long dirtnap and with it gone the others weren't far behind.

One thing I can't wait to do is set us up a multiplayer game so that we can go through the quests together.

The first slow day since I started

Today I can breathe a bit

I've been in the new job about a month and for most of that time I've been way too busy to post anything here. The first week or so I was learning how the software was organized, then it was straight into fixing one of the simpler of the known bugs.

Having taken care of that one, I was thrown into the deep end when I was assigned a far more complicated bug fix - one that involved changes all the way from the JSPs at the front end to the JDBC at the back. The back end wasn't a problem - that's where I'm used to working - but it's been a while since I had to mess with HTML and Javascript. Still, the job was estimated at five days and it took me maybe seven altogether - not too bad considering I'm still feeling my way around the system.

In any case I'm now in limbo waiting for the next batch of bug reports to come through. The most challenging thing I've done today is think of a list of possible codenames for the new source branch that we'll be creating for those fixes.

And so, being at something of a loose end, I can write something to post. I don't feel like getting into anything heavy and since I've been working hard I think it's time to play hard for a bit...

Game news 1 - Half-Life² episode 2

The release date for HL2.2 has been pushed back yet again. It was originally supposed to be on the shelves late last year, then the word was it would appear around March '07 (i.e. about now). The latest word is that we won't see it until the third quarter of this year. Bah.

Game news 2 - Sacred 2: Fallen Angel

It looks like this one has been pushed back too - although it's difficult if not impossible to find anything specific on the official website, a note on Wikipedia says that the release date is now Q1 2008. Double bah.

There are a few interesting snippets available; for example it seems that you can choose to play your character on either the good or bad side, that there will be six character classes, the graphics will be exceptionally good, and the game is actually a prequel rather than a sequel, set about two thousand years before the storyline of the original Sacred.

Well, I suppose there is one good thing about the delayed release dates on both games: more time to buy faster computers and better graphics cards. Kate's machine and mine were high-spec when we got them, and the graphics cards were and still are pretty hot, but games are already out that expect faster CPUs than we have. I expect Sacred 2 in particular to be very demanding on the graphics.

Game news 3 - Titan Quest

A couple of months ago Gametrailers.com posted a video review of Titan Quest (click here to see the video review, if you have the bandwidth). They didn't give it particularly high marks for originality but all the same it looked interesting, and a few days ago Kate and I bought it to see how we liked it.

It's damn good. If you like swords-and-sorcery games like Diablo, Diablo II, Sacred etc., then I can recommend Titan Quest. It's the same kind of thing, this time set in the world of ancient Greek myths.

I'd recommend getting hold of the Immortal Throne expansion - it gives you ten extra player levels, another Mastery (which in combination with the existing masteries adds eight new character classes to the original 36), a complete new region/quest, extra storage for valuable items and a whole lot more.

There are some things I don't like and I wish they'd fix:

• The gameplay can get a little jerky at times; I'm going to try disabling my network connection and antivirus software to see if that helps.


• Only one camera angle - you can zoom in and out, but you can't pan around. Mostly it's not a problem but there have been times when the view is obscured by tree branches or overhanging rocks during a fight and it would be nice to be able to see who I'm fighting.


• When you save your game and restore it always restarts you at the last "Rebirth Fountain" - there isn't a genuine save/restore feature. This means that if you want to quit playing you have two choices - wait until you find the next fountain, or put up with having to go over a whole bunch of ground you already covered. Diablo II does pretty much the same thing, and I detested it. At least in Titan Quest the fountains don't seem to be as far apart as the save points in Diablo II, so it doesn't seem so bad - but what are the developers thinking with this? There's no need for it.


• Day/night cycles are something that no doubt the game designers think is a really cool idea - Diablo II has them, Sacred has them, no doubt a bunch of other games have them. Personally I wish there was an option to switch this off - I hate having to squint to see what I'm fighting at "night".


• The game could really use a whole stack more side-quests.

Despite all that the game is highly addictive, great to look at and lots of fun.

Until next time...

I suspect this little break isn't going to last long and it could well be another month before I get time to write again. We'll see...

Goodbye Texas, Hello Colorado

Yes, we moved

...and that's the main reason I haven't blogged for a while. It all started about six weeks ago, when I got a really interesting job offer. Then I was told that they wanted me to start the new job in two weeks, even though it meant moving a thousand miles. I managed to push the start back a week, but it still meant a lot to do in a short time.

What I should have done was to have professional movers come in, pack all our stuff, load it, move it, unload and unpack. If I'd done it that way we'd have probably been done in just a couple of days.

But I didn't do it that way. Instead I rented two trucks and a car transporter and we did most of the loading ourselves. I hired a couple of guys in Texas to load the heavy stuff we couldn't manage, and another bunch of guys in Colorado to unload.

The whole thing was a nightmare. There was far more stuff to pack and load than I thought. Kate wore herself out packing; I wore myself loading stuff onto the trucks (and unloading and reloading one truck when the guys I hired to load the furniture did it so badly they wasted more than half the available space).

Finally, at about 4am one morning about three weeks ago, we got to the point where we were ready to leave... and couldn't, because when I got the car onto the transporter I found the thing had a broken ratchet on the right side, and we had to wait four hours for a mechanic to come out and fix it.

We got just a couple of hours sleep on a hard floor, and finally got away at about lunchtime. Kate was so tired that we didn't even make it as far as the Texas/Oklahoma state line before she started falling asleep at the wheel and we had to stop and get a motel room.

Starting off from there the next morning, we didn't stop again except for bathroom breaks, coffee breaks, food breaks and fresh-air wake-ups, until we got to our new house. Normally, after a night's sleep it wouldn't have been so bad - but number 1 son had shared his bad cold with us before we left and that, probably combined with exhaustion to lower our resistance, was the final blow. By the time we got to the area around Denver Kate was so ill I was wondering if we'd have to park the trucks up in the parking lot of a hospital.

But we finally made it. We're still unpacking things but the house is becoming more homey every day. The area is beautiful - we can see the rockies off to the west, covered in snow; there are places to go and things to do, and unlike Texas you can go for a walk without having to worry about dying from exhaustion in 110° heat.

But if we ever have to move again, it will be done the proper way - like I said, I'll get the professionals in to do it for us, even if it means going into debt to cover the cost. Anything is worth not having to go through that again...

Look Upon my Blog and Despair

...which is exactly what I've been doing, since I haven't posted a damned thing here since April. This isn't because I haven't wanted to write, but because I seem to have been permanently blocked.

Regular readers may have noticed in the past that I've written about things that disturb me in the good ol' USA -- the simian president and his corrupt repugnican menagerie, for example, or the rabid religious right and the way they're trying to destroy the place. The trouble is that writing about that stuff makes my BP go up even higher, and frankly I decided to try to chill for the sake of my health.

Hence the more recent writings have tended to be about more laid-back subjects such as home video, or computer games, or podcasts. But the cool, crystal wellspring of inspiration about such things slowed to a trickle, and finally turned into a kind of stagnant muddy puddle with dead bugs floating in it.

Today I resolved to force myself to write something. Be prepared, gentle reader, for a collection of random brain-farts as I try to scrape the rust off my brain's writing lobe...

Video

I have work to do. I took about 90 minutes of video in Virginia, Pennsylvania and Maryland a few months ago when we went up to visit number-two son. A few weeks after that I got another couple of tapes worth at the Scarborough Faire Renaissance Festival down in Waxahachie. Both sets of tapes have been captured onto my hard drive, and I reviewed the first set... and that's as far as I've got. So I have to make a start into picking out the usable stuff and editing it into to some sort of order.

Maybe I should write a series of posts about videography. I'll consider that idea.

Games

Kate and I have been playing Sacred again, probably for the first time in a year. I'd forgotten how much fun that game is. We also went ahead and bought Sacred Underworld, the expansion pack, and that's cool too -- the graphics are definitely smoother than the original. There's a sequel on the way (Sacred: Dark Angel, I think it's going to be called) but I don't know when they're planning on releasing that yet.

Ascaron, the company that makes Sacred, has just released a space-sim called Darkstar One which looks like Freelancer on steroids. I played the free demo a few weeks ago and it looks pretty good.

I also got Half-life 2: Episode 1 right after it came out. Regular readers may cast their minds back to Christmas 2004, when I wrote on this very blog about how I would never buy another game that uses Steam. Ok, I lied. Half-life is just too good a game to miss out on. I still think Steam stinks, though.

Speed

We finally bit the bullet, got broadband installed and joined the rest of the twenty-first century. It hasn't been without its own little family of problems, though...

Setting the thing up the first time, I just couldn't get it to connect to the Internet. The problem turned out to be the order you power things up the first time -- you have to put the router on first, then the modem, and not the other way round like the manual said.

With that hurdle passed, we were off and running... or so we thought. We realized pretty soon that there was some kind of serious problem -- the connection would just seize up for twenty or thirty seconds at a time, so web pages would time out and mail wouldn't send, and all the rest.

I finally narrowed it down to a problem either in the router or the cable connecting it to the modem. "Can't be the router," I thought, because it's a Linksys made by Cisco, and Cisco know a thing or two about networks. So I replaced the cable thinking maybe I'd stretched it or kinked it or something when I was feeding it behind the furniture.

Wrong. Kate and I were very, very careful not to bend, kink, stretch or perform any other kind of topological operation on the cable as we put it in place... and it made no difference at all. The problem was still there. Bugger.

So last night I ran out to Fry's to get another router -- a Netgear, this time -- and it looks like our problems have gone away. Note to readers: avoid the Linksys BEFSR41 router -- online reviews weren't great and it sure looks like we got a bad one. The Netgear is smaller, works better and was cheaper, too.

Stop Press... the problems came back, so it wasn't the router after all, so ignore what I said about the Linksys router. Looks like the problem is at our provider's end. More on this as it develops...

Everyone should read this book

I just bought a copy of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris and even though I'm only a chapter or so into it so far, I have to say that everyone should read this book.

Harris has got the guts to say what a whole bunch of us have thought but NOT said for a long time: that the biggest, most important threat to humanity at this time is religion. But it goes much further than that. Anyone that isn't scared by this book has their head in the sand.

Religious fundamentalists will hate the book and I really don't expect any to read it, but I'd still implore them to try. Religious moderates and liberals might have an easier go, even though Harris has some harsh words to say about them and these comments have led to some criticism; having read at least part of what Harris wrote on that subject, I tend to side with him on those points.

I used to think that religion and reason could live side by side provided that governments stuck to reason when making policy, and religious extremism could be softened somewhat with decent education. Thanks to Harris, I no longer believe this and I'm almost ashamed to admit that I ever subscribed to such a naïve view. I am now worried that religious ideas may very well destroy us if we don't do something to stop it happening, and quick.

There was a time when it didn't matter so much if some head of state ruled his domain according to religious dogma. In an age of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons, this is no longer true. All it would take these days is, for example, for a devout Christian ruler of a powerful country to believe that a global war would presage the second coming, and that the end result would be that the deserving get to heaven while the rest go to burn forever - the "kill 'em all and let God sort 'em out" approach - and that is very scary. And if that sounds far-fetched, think for a moment about Dubya, his belief in the power of prayer and the two billion dollars of illegal funding for "faith-based initiatives".

There's a lot more to it that just this, of course, but I'm not going into it all here. Buy a copy of the book or borrow it from your local library, but whatever you do, read it.

Incidentally, check out the Point of Inquiry podcast (the feed URL is in the sidebar to the right) - they have a two-part interview with Harris talking about the book. Very interesting.

Chicago, Chicago

Things have been very busy over the last few weeks, which is the main reason that I haven't been posting as frequently and the few posts I have put up have been so short. Here's what's been going on...

First, I changed jobs about a month ago. I was working for a well-known online travel agent; now I'm working for a major financial company. The pay's better, I work with people I knew from the-job-before-the-job-before, and it's only half the driving distance so I save time and gas money.

Second, my number-2 son Donny graduated his class as a Navy recruit and so last week we drove to North Chicago for the graduation ceremony. The trip up wasn't too bad because Kate and I were able to share the twenty-odd hours driving duty. The only big problem we had was with the motel.

Kate had organized a room at the Belvidere-Slumberland Hotel in Waukegan. When she called, the guy she spoke to ("Raj") promised us a room for $40 a night and said that because he'd had problems with credit cards, he didn't want us to pay over the phone and that rather we should wait until we got there. That seemed a bit strange but we went with it.

Somewhere past Lincoln, IL we decided we'd better call the hotel as we were still a few hours out and wanted to make sure we still had a room, even though Kate had told Raj that we probably wouldn't be arriving until late. Raj wasn't there and the guy who answered the phone told us, rudely, that that had no record of us. It turned out that Raj didn't work at that hotel but at another one nearby, possibly called the Bel Air. Shortly after that, number-1 son (Jc) called from home to say that Raj had called to tell us that if we were didn't get there soon he'd have to let the room go.

We let the room go ourselves by simply not calling back or showing up. I have no idea who the hell Raj really was, what his relationship with the Belvidere-Slumberland hotel was or what he was playing at but we didn't like the sound of it one bit. We decided to find somewhere else. Luckily, Kate had printed the list of local motels and started hitting the cellphone while I drove up the last hundred or so miles, and soon we had a room arranged at the Great Lakes Motel, whose motto should be "$35 rooms for less than twice that!"

The room was mostly clean and tidy but was definitely way overpriced - $65/night even with a Navy discount. No microwave, no fridge, no way to make tea or coffee. We bought a bag of ice at the gas station next door and dumped it in the sink to keep drinking water, milk and sodas cooled. On the day before we left (i.e. our fourth day there) the management noticed this and moved a fridge in from another room (so at least one of the rooms does in fact have a fridge, but I won't even guess how much it costs).

So, for anyone else planning on visiting Navy recruits at Great Lakes, be warned: the staff at the Belvidere-Slumberland are rude; if you find another hotel/motel near that one and someone named Raj works there, back out slowly with your hand on your wallet; and remember that the Great Lakes Hotel is overpriced but OK as a last resort - if you take an ice chest and your own means of making coffee.

Also, I thought Texas drivers were bad but Illinois drivers are, incredibly, much worse. At one point, running at 65 in a 55 zone (purely because everyone else was going so fast that doing 55 would have actually been more dangerous) one asshole passed me doing at least 75 on the shoulder and looked at me like I was the one doing something wrong.

Now, griping over. The trip had lots of good points and on the whole we enjoyed ourselves a lot.

Waukegan Beach is awesome. It has sand; it has waves; you can't see the far side of Lake Michigan. If you didn't know better you'd swear you were on a coastal beach, except that the water isn't salty. The beach itself was mostly clean and has drums set up at intervals for garbage, and it seems that most people use them - but all the same, watch out for dogshit and shards of glass from broken beer bottles.

The Navy Pier in Chicago is great fun - plenty of places to get food and drinks (although being touristy the prices are higher) and lots to do, such as taking a speedboat ride or a trip on a tall ship, or even lunch or dinner aboard the Odyssey (lunch $50, dinner $84, for a three hour cruise). There's a small fairground and a museum of stained glass.

The trip back was a killer; Kate and I both started with symptoms of bad colds on the day we were due to leave. Kate's got so bad she couldn't drive so I did the whole thing non-stop except for 10-15 minute breaks for leg-stretching and coffee-buying. We started from Chicago at around 1pm Monday and got home just after 8am the next morning - 19 hours. Amazingly, I didn't start to get drowsy at the wheel until we were all the way back to Denison, TX - less than two hours from home.

The way we understand it, Donny has nine weeks in engineering school before the next break, so we'll be planning another trip up there I guess... except this time, I think we'll be planning to fly :)

Java Planet

My new blog aimed at Java developers is now live - take a look.

The plan is to post a new article once a week on average. One article is up, the next one is being written and I have a list of about a dozen articles to write for the coming weeks.

Back on the air

My regular readers (Sid and Doris Bonkers of Penge) will have noticed that I haven't posted anything for a while. Well, quite a bit has been going on but I just haven't given any time to writing...

First, the auction turned out to be a complete waste of time. Several hundred people viewed the eBay listing page and a couple of people added it to their watch lists - I even dropped the starting price in the hope that it might tempt someone to start the ball rolling with a bid, but it was no good. To be honest that pisses me off - CXA took me about three months to write and, dammit, it's a good program. Three months of a professional developer's time runs to around $15,000 in salary alone, yet I couldn't even get a $500 starting bid. Ah, well... I'm putting it to one side and forgetting about it for a while.

I mentioned a few posts back that I had a couple of other projects going. Well, the woodworking project is complete as far as I can take it, in the sense that the actual wood-butchery part was finished a couple of weeks ago. All that's left is the painting and Kate's taking care of that so, as they say, my work here is done.

My other work-in-progress is a program I'm putting together bit by bit. More about that later, but I can say that I should have something that can be beta-tested in just a few more days if I can get a couple of hours a day in on it.

The biggest thing going on right now is that Kate has been ill for a few days and all my time has been taken up with making sure she's ok. For the last two days the only reason I've had my computer running is to provide a little extra heat for Sierra (Kate's Ball Python) to make sure she wouldn't get too cold while I was away from the house.

In other news, I see that the Labour Party won the election in the UK (good - even thought they seem to have moved to the right in the last few years they still have to be better than any Conservative government); Tom DeLay has still not been arrested and imprisoned; and the Kansas State Board of Edukayshun have proved conclusively that it's possible to have a PhD and be a complete air-head at the same time, as evidenced by a number of people who are (presumably) reasonably intelligent in regards to their own fields of expertise but who seem to lose all rationality and reason when scientific truths clash with their unproven and unprovable religious beliefs. Unfortunately it seems that here in the US - supposedly on the bleeding edge of science and technology - in this twenty-first century, good old seventeenth-century thinking is not only alive and kicking, but actually seems to be on the rise. The scariest part of it is that this stupidity seems to be sneaking its way into government circles. I fear for the future of western civilization if this is allowed to go much further.

Program Still For Sale

I relisted CXA on eBay - click here

I had a hundred or so people look at the eBay listing for CXA and I received a couple of questions about it but no bids. Ah well... I've dropped the price and relisted it. I'm going to add a link to this blog on the eBay listing too. I don't know what that might achieve, but what the hell.

If you happen to look at the item listing and it interests you, please add any questions you have through the eBay page so they show up on the auction listing, rather than adding them as comments here.

Program for sale

Please check this out - click here.

A couple of years ago I wrote a program called CXA. It's a bulk email program, 100% pure Java, designed to let small and medium size businesses send out personalized mail to their customers automatically, quickly and easily. (Before you ask, gentle reader: No, it's not a spam program. There are specialized bulk mailers that scurvy spammers use - they do things like generating random, fake email addresses, and the spammers are rarely interested in knowing open and click-through rates for their junk so those programs don't bother with them. Responsible emailers only send to people who signed up, they adhere to the law and generally they're more interested in seeing what percentage of the mail they send is being read. CXA was written for the responsible crowd.)

It never sold. Not because it's a bad program, but because although I'm a damn good Java programmer (Master-level, according to Brainbench) I'm not a salesman by any stretch of anyone's imagination.

So, rather than just having it sit there doing nobody any good, and because right now a little cash injection (or even better, a big cash injection) wouldn't be a bad thing, I've put it up for sale on eBay. The item listing is right here.

I'm not selling individual copies here; what I'm offering is the whole package, lock, stock & barrel. Source code, user documentation, development documentation, the license generator tool that goes with, everything. Whoever buys it will be able, assuming they have better marketing skills than I do (which isn't hard), to market it themselves.

If you're interested please take a look. The auction ends about this time next week.

That's enough unhilarity

It occurred to me that most news recently - on the news sites and in the blogosphere - has been far too depressing. Bush and the rest of the Radical "Religious" Right and their agenda to turn the US into a theocracy and take us all back to the dark ages; the continuing criminal antics of Tom "Sleazy Crook" DeLay; the sad story of Terri Schiavo and how what should have been private family business became a wagon for the right, the church and just about everyone else with an agenda to jump aboard; the incredible, crass, unbelievable stupidity of people who will do anything to protect their beliefs when they have never spent even ten minutes to stop and think about why they believe what they do, in most cases without even a shred of evidence, let alone solid proof...

I'm sick of hearing about it all.

It's time instead for some real news. And here it is...

Astronomers capture photo of extrasolar planet

It doesn't sound like much when you say it quick, but just think about this. For one thing it's difficult enough to get pictures of planets right here in our own solar system. It's been seventy-five years since Pluto was discovered and we still don't have a picture of it that shows more detail than a fuzzy blob, for example. The best and most detailed photos we have of planets and moons here in our own planetary neighbourhood are taken by robot probes that get pretty close to their targets.

You may be aware that over the last few years astronomers have discovered over a hundred planets in orbit around other stars. All of these other planets were found because of the way their gravity makes the stars "wobble" a bit from side to side as the planet goes around. In other words, we know they're there but we've never seen them. Until now. For the first time ever, we actually have an image that we can say is a planet in orbit around another star.

Admittedly the astronomers had a few things going for them; the planet they tagged is very hot (over 3000 Fahrenheit), very big (twice the diameter of Jupiter) and far enough from its parent star so that the light from the planet didn't get swamped by the light from the star. And the photo by itself isn't that spectacular, either; you can't see clouds or oceans or land masses - just a glowing blob.

But that shouldn't detract from the fact that this is an incredible and historic acheivement. Telescopes are getting better and better with every passing year. It's only a matter of time before we're able to get pictures of extrasolar planets that show some real detail - clouds and oceans and land masses. And perhaps one day, even cities.

So click on the link and take a look at the picture and bear in mind that while it may not look like anything much right now, this picture will be in our grandchildrens's history books. Because it's the first of its kind, and that only happens once.

Reality overshadows Blog shock horror probe

I haven't posted recently and I probably won't be posting very much over the next few weeks either. Maybe the odd short note now and again. The thing is, I'm working on a couple of other projects that are taking most of my time right now. One is a program I'm working on; the other is a woodworking project - I've just about finished building a stand for a new tank we bought for Sierra, Kate's python. It's amazing how long it takes to build what is basically nothing but a table.

Another reason I haven't written much is that most of what's been going on recently - Terri Schiavo, the Pope and that d*ck Tom DeLay, for example - has been all over the blogosphere already and there's nothing I can really add. Sure, I've got my views about these and other things but right now I just don't feel much like putting them out there.

So I guess the only real reason I'm banging away at the keyboard right now is to tell my regular readers (Sid and Doris Bonkers of Crouch End) why my blog hasn't been too active. That, and the fact that I spent most of today doing wood-butchering and getting sunburnt and now it's 3:20am and I'm still winding down. The time has come to slap a movie in the DVD player and stretch out in bed, I think.

Some soccer quotes...

I'd forgotten I had these...

The new West Stand casts a giant shadow over the entire pitch, even on a sunny day.

CHRIS JONES, Evening Standard

What will you do when you leave football, Jack - will you stay in football?

STUART HALL, Radio 5 Live

Unfortunately, we keep kicking ourselves in the foot.

RAY WILKINS, BBC1

I've got a gut feeling in my stomach...

ALAN SUGAR, BBC1

I would not say he [David Ginola] is the best left winger in the Premiership, but there are none better.

RON AKTINSON, Carling FA Premiership WWW Page

Johnson has revelled in the 'hole' behind Dwight Yorke...

Carling FA Premiership WWW Page

An inch or two either side of the post and that would have been a goal.

DAVE BASSETT, Sky Sports

Both sides have scored a couple of goals, and both sides have conceded a couple of goals.

PETER WITHE, Radio 5 Live

You don't score 64 goals in 86 games at the highest level without being able to score goals.

ALAN GREEN, Radio 5 Live

What's it like being in Bethlehem, the place where Christmas began? I suppose it's like seeing Ian Wright at Arsenal....

SIMON FANSHAWE, Talk Radio

And we all know that in football if you stand still you go backwards...

PETER REID, Tyne Tees Sport Special

I was saying the other day, how often the most vulnerable area for goalies is between their legs...

ANDY GRAY, Sky Sport

The lad got over-excited when he saw the whites of the goalpost's eyes.

STEVE COPPELL, Radio 5 Live

They [Rosenborg] have won 66 games, and they've scored in all of them.

BRIAN MOORE, ITV

If you can't stand the heat in the dressing-room, get out of the kitchen.

TERRY VENABLES, Capital Gold

The lads really ran their socks into the ground.

ALEX FERGUSON

He [Brian Laudrup] wasn't just facing one defender - he was facing one at the front and one at the back as well.

TREVOR STEVEN, STV

It's now 1-1, an exact reversal of the score on Saturday.

Radio 5 Live

...but Arsenal are quick to credit Bergkamp with laying on 75% of their nine goals.

TONY GUBBA, BBC Match of the Day

...an excellent player, but he [Ian Wright] does have a black side.

GARY LINEKER, BBC

We say 'educated left foot'... of course, there are many players with
educated right foots.

RON JONES, Radio 5 Live

That's twice now he [Terry Phelan] has got between himself and the goal.

BRIAN MARWOOD, Radio 5 Live

Mark Hughes at his very best: he loves to feel people right behind him...

KEVIN KEEGAN

Football today, it's like a game of chess. It's all about money.

NEWCASTLE UNITED FAN, Radio 5 Live

Gary always weighed up his options, especially when he had no choice.

KEVIN KEEGAN, Radio 5 Live

We threw our dice into the ring and turned up trumps.

BRUCE RIOCH, ITV

And I suppose they [Spurs] are nearer to being out of the FA Cup now than any other time since the first half of this season, when they weren't ever in it anyway.

JOHN MOTSON, BBC

... and he crosses the line with the ball almost mesmerically tied to his foot with a ball of string...

IAN DARKE, Radio 5

Fun for the weekend

A man goes into the Doctor's surgery with a pork chop in one ear, a potato in the other and a carrot up his nose.

"Doctor", he says, "What's wrong with me?" and the Doctor says, "You're not eating properly."