Status-Q

Hap has given us a wonderful book which includes some extracts from the “Travellers Manual for French Persons in Germany and German Persons in France”, written by Mme de Genlis at the end of the 18th century. It includes the following useful phrases, which you may want to look up in other languages in case you need them next time you get off your RyanAir flight:

Listen, postilion, if you drive at a good speed when the road is good, and slowly on corners and bridges or in towns and villages, then I shall give you a good tip. Otherwise, you shall have only the fare.

Postilion, a man has just climbed onto the back of the coach. Make him get down.

The descent is quite steep. I wish the brakes to be attached.

I believe that the wheels are on fire. Look and see.

The postilion has fainted. Administer the eau de Luce.

Gently remove the postilion from beneath the horse.

A quick note to let you know (if you didn’t already) that Camvine is looking for really good technical people and sales/marketing/bus. dev. people. (One of each, at present).

Contact me if you’d like to know more about life in a fun Cambridge startup…

I’ve walked past the Sofitel in Queenstown, NZ. But I never popped in to use the gents’ loo. Which is a pity, because it’s rather fun!

From ‘Mental Floss‘.

Zebra striping is the practice of using alternating background colours in rows of a table. It’s supposed to make the table easier to read.

Jessica Enders did a study and discovered that a small majority of people preferred the look of striped tables. But did they actually help? Find out here.

As my friends will tell you, I’m not a political animal. I tend to vote for a different party at each election, and I often make up my mind when I’m actually in the polling booth, typically using some highly-sophisticated reasoning like, “Big majorities are bad – they’re like big monopolies – so I want to support the little guy”. Well, it’s often not far from that. And that’s assuming I actually remember that it’s polling day.

Now, it’s not that I don’t care about what happens to the country, or that I don’t value democracy.

It’s partly that I feel insufficiently informed to make a judgement. I don’t have time to follow the news, I’m highly sceptical about most of what I read in the papers, and like all well-brought-up Englishmen, I know that politics is not a suitable topic of discussion at the dinner table. (I remember amazing some American friends by telling them that I had no idea how my parents voted and that I certainly wouldn’t dream of asking them.) To raise the topic of politics is to invite an argument or to assume that others think the same way as you – neither is very polite, though in some circles you can get away with it if nobody present has any strong views.

Meanwhile, back at the polling station, there’s generally so little to differentiate the candidates and parties that it’s hard to make a judgement unless you believe very strongly in a few specific issues – always, I feel, a bad basis for electing a government that may be in power for a long time and is unlikely to worry too much about its manifesto once they’re there.

What I really long for is interesting politicians. You could have an opinion about Margaret Thatcher or Neil Kinnock; you could guess what they might say or do differently on a particular topic. But William Hague or Gordon Brown or, well, anybody recent really… in hindsight some of them may have been better choices than others but not really in any way that could have been predicted in advance.

Where are the old rogues, the wits, the orators, the rebels, the great statesmen? People you could applaud, curse, or admire? People who have the balls to make big gestures and risk big mistakes. Have they really gone, or is it that we and the press have just got more sceptical, more risk-averse?

Anyway, whatever you may think about London’s choice of mayor, both the departing and the arriving one, Londoners do at least have an advantage over the rest of the country in having politicians who can be readily distinguished from each other. Much more interesting..

Am upgrading Status-Q to the latest WordPress…

Let me know if you see any funnies…

I was 11 years old when the first series of Blake’s 7 came out, and was instantly hooked. I imagine it would look very corny if I watched it again 30 years on, but I can’t help but be intrigued by rumours that it might make a comeback, possibly with Sean Bean in the lead role.

Hope they keep the same theme music…

I think this is the best idea that I’ve seen for distributed computing on the SETI@home model: earthquake detection.

As you probably know, many new laptops come with accelerometers in them which let them do things like park the hard disk heads if dropped, before they hit the ground and the heads crash into large chunks of your data. People have made various fun toy applications using the output of these sensors. But what can you do if you network large numbers of accelerometer-enabled computers together?

Who knows how well it will work, but it’s a great example of lateral thinking. And vertical.

One of the useful bits of information in the manual for my new car:

Always be careful when closing a door. You could otherwise cause serious injuries to yourself or others. Make sure that no one is in the path of a door.

Good. I’m glad they put that in. It’s a big manual, though, and I haven’t got to the “Running with scissors” section yet, so I’m not handling any office implements for a while.