NK Update

Pyonyang says that sanctions imposed as a consequence of its recent nuclear test represents a declaration of war. Ho hum. Next step, a nuke-tipped missile destined for Seuol or Tokyo? Or at least, a second test to rattle the cage a bit further.

Say what you may about Kim, but he has got balls the size of Gibraltar Rock.

A New World Order

Remember this day; the day the world stood still. North Korea has set off a nuke. Good for Bush's War on Terror, bad for the world.

Stuff from the Wires

PhD bad for business? Well, we all knew that, really. Top 10 Geek Business Myths.

The Abyss

"If you gaze into the abyss, the abyss also gazes into you", a well-known German thinker stated many years ago. The US appears to have been staring into the abyss of the so called "War on Terror", and basically legalised torture. When fighting an evil, one must take great care not to become that which one fights. There is no good coming from trading hard-won freedoms for an illusion of security. The Bush administration is fond of saying that the terrorists hate those that love freedom. Well, freedom just took a beating. The terrorist agenda has always been aiming at curtailing freedom. Andreas Baader wanted to bring about a revolution by forcing a revolt against a police state that would come about by the government removing one freedom after the other in response to random acts of terror. Twisted thinking, sure, but they came quite close to the police state, and Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof was allegedly murdered by the police in their cells to avoid the messy rule of law.

So now the CIA is free to detain indefinitely without trial terrorist suspects. They can torture them, provided that they are not raped or that no biological experiments are conducted on them. Does this sound like the laws of a nation that values freedom and the rule of law?

Whilest the founding fathers are turning in their graves, I'm sure Andreas Baader is nodding approvingly in his.

Espania

Just back from a week in southern Spain, at the family Hacienda, meeting up with Chris and Nana from the UK. The climate is very nice this time of year; warm without being oppressive. Went running along the beach with Chris a couple of times, around 8k. He could have left me in the dust, but was polite enough to stick to my pace. Just uploaded my data from the Polar watch and it confirmed I'd been in the red zone for 85% of my runs.. no wonder I was feeling warm.

Anyway, the area is a bit chav-heavy, but with a large, walled garden complete with pool, it was a pretty relaxing stay. Sadly, the Hacienda is now up for sale for reasons harking back to my father's death, so it was probably the last visit.

The morning after the night before

This is good for Sweden. Perhaps work will pay again. Perhaps people can get to decide more about how they want their health and child care, education and business conducted, instead of having the government dictate it to them. Hopfefully the more obnoxious, unfair taxes, such as property and wealth tax, will now be abolished. A small government dealing only in such matters which a government should deal with, and not meddling in matters concerning the individual.

A regime change right in the middle of a period of economic growth is unprecedented, and a serious vote of no confidence for the previous ruling elite which had become too accustomed to the seats of power.

Let freedom ring.

The Dawning of A New Era

23.00: Moderaterna has declared themselves the victors of this election. It's extraordinary. Biggest increase since the dawn of time, for any party, 10.5%. Persson is giving his concession speech as we speak. He's resigning the leadership.

The Social Democrats have ruled for 88 of the last 100 years.

The future starts here.

Election night

21.40: Current prediction at 173 MPs for the Dark Side and 176 for the Democratic Alliance. A New Hope. Will The Empire Strike Back?

Chief of Design, Apple

Interesting article about Jonathan Ive, Apple's design guru.

Anyway. Tomorrow is election day. My prediction is a regime change, and not a day too early.

eMusic gets it

eMusic has launched in Europe. Is this the first example of an e-tailer that 'gets it'? Here's the rub: I can order CDs from Amazon, say I take advantage of the current 3 CDs for £15 offer - for the sake of argument Keane's Hopes & Fears, the seminal remastered Live at Leeds, with The Who and maybe Weezer's Weezer, and rip to non-DRMed MP3 and listen to the choons on a variety of devices: home stereo, car, iPod, laptop whatever. Alternatively, I can download the same tunes from the iTunes Music Store and (a) pay more, (b) get lousy quality rips and (c) get data that's laden with DRM restrictions meaning I can only use it on a limited number of devices.

Tricky choice. Not.

Let's be realistic. All music is already available, for free, on line from the various P2P nets. However, some people actually want to pay for their digital data. What they don't want to pay for are artificially imposed restrictions that limit how they can use their purchases, especially since these restrictions just wouldn't be present had they purchased the same music on a CD.

It's so obvious it hurts.

So, if I could buy music losslessly encoded, or high-bitrate lossy without DRM (lossless sort of implies non-DRM), it would be the same rights for me as the customer as if I had purchased the CD. Given that there's no manufacturing, or distribution costs involved I'd expect that the price would be a quarter or less without anyone making any less money. Would we pay for it? Sure, I would - fair rights, fair price. Would I purchase music or films from the iTunes music store, or Napster (rife with even more ridiculous DRM concepts) or any other DRM-ridden fayre?

No way.

Now though, eMusic has launched. They sell MP3s without restrictions. Download to your heart's content for a monthly fee. After you've downloaded a track you own it, and can do with it whatever you like. Hey presto, they get it! Of course, the big boys aren't happy and thus eMusic's catalogue is somewhat wanting. But still - if I was Apple or Microsoft, I'd worry. Customers vote with their wallets. DRM is a solution in search for a problem. Why should we accept it if it makes things harder for us to use digital data than it was before? The explosion in the P2P traffic is a direct consequence of the old-skool thinking in the boardrooms of the big media companies.

The whole market is there for the taking for the first Big Media Company that understands this.

Jobs

Sarah's been busy sorting out her CV. She uploaded it last night, with a "no one will ever employ me" sigh. Today the phones haven't stopped ringing. Work for my company! No, MINE! Work in Cardiff, it's almost Bristol! They started ringing at 6 this morning. I put it down to my killer-CV format :)

Running

Long run last night, nearly 15k. One hour fifteen, not exactly a world record, but probably the longest distance I've run since last year's half marathon. Had expected to be crippled this morning, but feeling OK. I see from my training log that that run took me over a weekly 45k, a personal record, at least since I got my Polar watch to keep track of these things for me. Think I'll restrict today's exercise to a leisurly Power Yoga session this afternoon.

Summer, just

So the summer has returned for one last spell before the Swedish eternal darkness descends for good. Last week saw rain almost every day, and running in the evenings means returning in darkness. I've started running in long trousers now. Amazing how quickly the summer goes. But the sun's out today, at least. The Swedish General Election is drawing closer, and the child-like bickering is most amusing. I guess the 'problem' is that there isn't really that much to argue about in this country. Most amusing of all the the much shouted about Folkpartiet-gate, where apparently one of the parties hacked into one of the others network, supposedly stealing electoral secrets. Well, I say 'hacked' where in fact it was one of the users' password that was the same as his name. Very secure. Is it immoral to exploit others stupidity? Apparently it's illegal, but come on!

Steve Irwin

So Steve 'Croc Hunter' Irwin finally met his match, in the shape of a sting ray. Ironically, being killed by a sting ray is very rare indeed - apparently only one other recorded case in Oz. I learnt the hard - or sharp, shall we say - way why they're called sting rays when diving off the coast of Belize a few years back. One swish of the tail, and a very bleeding hand.

Steve himself had a loyal following all around the world, it would seem. Even Slashdot covered the story, which is about as far away from its normal fayre one can get. We actually passed by his Australia Zoo when we travelled up the east coast of Oz in January, but we never went in.

Vaseline

One of my biggest problems when running any sort of reasonable distance is, ahem, an element of chafing. A quick trawl through running related web resources soon reveals that I am not alone in this. Chris recommended to try firstly a pair of cycling shorts to keep all in its place, and if that didn't work, liberal amounts of vaseline applied in strategic places around big Jim and the twins. Apparently, during his London Marathon, St John's Ambulance had personnel out, wearing latex gloves handing out fistfuls of the stuff along the course. The cycling shorts helped a bit, but I soon realised that for any run exceeding 30 mins I'd need to try the vaseline treatment. In Tesco they sell poxy little tins the size of 50p coins that would hardly coat anything worthwhile. I headed for the big Boots out at Cribb's Causeway. I wander aimlessly about for a while, before asking an attendant. She directs me towards the tiny tins. I whisper that I'm on the market for something slightly more man-sized. She looks at me with a strange expression, and says that the industrial sized vats are kept in the mother & baby section, but that I might want to consider alternative products for 'intimate purposes'. I open my mouth to vigorously defend my honour, but soon realise that there's nothing I can say to rectify the situation. I skulk over to the mother and baby section and grab a tub..

..which works great, when liberally applied.

Thanks for the tip, Chris.

Free, limitless energy

Yep. No more oil dependency or global warming. Limitless, clean energy out of thin air. We laugh in the face of the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Buy your shares now! Eat sand Saudis, the Irish will rule the world.

Steorn

King Kong (E1 5b), Wintour's Leap

King Kong (E1 5b), Wintour's Leap
Originally uploaded by hvs.

Just back from a lightning visit to The Crag of Dreams (Wintour's Leap). Paul and I climbed the classic 'King Kong', which was pretty sustained for the grade. This is actually my first bit of proper climbing this year so far, disturbingly, what with broken legs etc. Paul's part of the guidebook effort for the crag, so we moved on to investigate one of his remaining routes probably outside his comfort zone, La Folie, at a respectable E4 6a. We worked it in an ethically dubious manner, and to both of our surprises managed to do it. One to return to.

Martin Crocker has been responsible for BMC's general tidy-up of much of Wintour's, and boy have they done an amazing job. It's like a whole new crag with vegetation cut back, rotten, dangerous rock removed and crumbling pegs replaced with shiny Petzl and Fixe expansion bolts. Some sections have been designated pure 'sport', and not a day too early, I say. Some of the more fundamentalist old guard are grumbling, but it's all done with the blessing of the BMC and in some cases with the express wishes of the land owners in order for them to grant access. Wintour's now sports a 100m+, 3 pitch, three star clip-up rated F7a. I'm sure that will have constant queues for a while.

Slackers

Some bold Brit slacking the Napes Needle:

Living Legends

Watching the European Track & Field Championships from Gothenburgh. Merlene Ottey has just advanced through the qualification stages. She has 35 major championship medals, and is 46 years old. 46! She still managed the 4th fastest time of the day. Speaking of legends, Carolina Kluft's only 23, but has already won everything that's worth winning, and pundits are already saying that she ought to quit the heptathlon and try some other discipline where she might encounter some opposition. She's leisurly cruising towards another championship gold. They say she's beaten the national tripple jump record in training, eventhough she's never done it competitively, and that she's clearing 3.8m in pole vault. The complete Athlete?

The Swedish high jumpers are also doing well with both Stefan and Linus qualifying rather effortlessly. Watched in disbelief Stefan Holm cissoring 2.10 in warmup. That's higher than the female world record.

New panels

They've reopened the gym and climbing wall after a month long outage when the place was rebuilt. Didn't think that they were going to do much to the wall, but they've reset every single route, thrown away - thank God - the useless EP featured panels and replaced them with plain ones, at least on the lead wall, and made the boulder wall 40cm higher. Now, had they only installed a kick panel on the boulder wall, and removed the top ropes it would have been an ace facility instead of merely a good one.

We've been focused on running lately. I love running, even if it doesn't come naturally to me - I lose running fitness quickly and take ages to build it up again. Add to that two recent leg breaks and two different orthopaedic surgeons saying that I'll never run again, I'm seriously addicted. The doctors are sort of right though - the first 500 metres of every run is agony, but after that my ankle starts limbering up a bit and the rest of the run usually goes without incident. The day after a run I struggle to walk on my left foot in the morning. In the forest here there's a 2.5k loop, but getting any sort of reasonable mileage out of that gets a bit repetitive, so we recently ferreted out a 10k run that although still encompasses one lap of the loop doesn't repeat itself (too much). We try to run about 10k every other day. A while back we got ourselves some Polar heart-rate monitors with a foot pod thingy to measure running speed, pace and distance. It's revolutionised the way I train and run. I've always found it difficult not to go balls to the wall when I run, and then only lasting about 5k before I'm spent. It's actually quite hard to judge when you're running say 75% and when you're running 90% of your max, but with the monitor I can see that if my heart rate falls between 160 and 170 I can keep up the run pretty much indefinitely. Sure, I won't beat any speed records, but for me running is about the distance. I did do the Bristol Half Marathon last year, foolishly undertrained, and although I completed it, every step was agony after about 8 miles. I'd like to get to a point where running 13 miles is not a once a year occurrence, but something one can do on a regular basis without being crippled for a week afterwards. The Lingontega run on Gräsö is a wonderful 10k run, too. Chris did that in an astonishing 42:50 this summer, nearly a full minute off my every kilometre. I don't aspire to run those sort of times, but being solid under 50 would be nice.

Of course, there's a natural extension to run to the ferry port and back, which would make that run 16k..eh, about 10 miles or so.

Sarah's now nearly half way through her level 4 Swedish course with Folkuniversitetet. They're working her hard, but the progress she's made is extraordinary. She's keeping up day to day regular conversations, and the amount of English we speak has dropped way down. I can't help but reflect on my school French, and the embarressingly modest return of investment those 6 years of study has given me. Sarah's two months of courses here has sent her so far beyond my French level that it is truly shameful on my behalf. It's also made me realise how much of my once solid Swedish formal grammar I've lost. Those of you who know Sarah know how she insists on understanding everything completely before moving on to the next issue, refusing to take anything as given. A natural academic streak.

"But why?" anyone?

But she's certainly learning fast.

On the culture front, me and my brother sat through the epic masterpiece "Ultraviolet" the other night, a sort of vampire-stroke-kung-fu tale with the easy on the eye Milla Jovovovovovich in the lead. Lots of guns and Matrix-style fighting. It's quite possibly the best film ever made.

Almost.