Rushin' to press

Had an offer from a Moscow publisher (Alexej) who wants to publish an anthology of short stories next year - a collage of cold-war crypto - fictional, but realistic, with contemporary authors from both sides of the past Iron Curtain. I explained that I can't write colloquial Russian fluently, I can barely make puns or one-liners in my usual sarcastic style; and Russian humour and UK humour differ seriously. We agreed that I'll write in German and he'll have someone from former East Germany having crypto knowhow do the translation. Working title is "Low level man". Several years ago I got a note from HM Gov, releasing me from the Official Secrets Act which I signed 40 years ago, so that should be OK. But I'll keep it tight anyway :-)
Of course, I could always use a pseudonym - that has tradition in Russia (e.g. Lenin).

So, Alexej, I've changed my Blog's header in your honour today, to a phonetic approximation of my name in Cyrillic letters, as far as this European keyboard will let me do it :lol:

I'm looking forward to writing the short story for you :-)

Surfing in the New Europe : As you may (or may not) know, the European Union (EU) will expand on saturday from 15 countries to 25, ten new members. What may interest bloggers is the Internet User density in the 10 new member countries (in the existing 15 member EU, there is an average of 355 Internet users per 1000 inhabitants). Below this average are : Cyprus with 261, Tscheck Republic with 255, Poland 232, Malta 209, Slovakia 160, Hungary 158, Lithuania 144 and last place is Latvia with only 133. Similar infrastructure to the EU-15 is in Slovenia which has 376 and Estonia with 327. So there's a web-market in the EU-25!

posted by Ctyapt Cabopu on 29th April 2004 at 06:00 Central European Time permalink

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Lucifer's Hammer

Well, books seen to be the meme these days. Joel Sax has a list of the top 101 books (according to some college bored (sic!)), turns out I've only got 52/101 so they think I should get the other 49/101 too, but I have different tastes (I prefer science fiction).

Instead I just re-read the original science-fiction story "Lucifers Hammer" by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Great: 9 out of 10. It got me thinking about strikes by asteroids etc.: if Lucifer did have a hammer anywhere near here, he'd probably aim it at the RC cathedral in nearby Paderborn, the centre of Roman Catholicism in Germany. That's only 18 km away, as Death's Dark Angel flies. So using a link given in the sidebar of Making Light (thanks Teresa!), I was able to estimate the effects (on us at home) of four different sized Hammers (with and without Viagra, coming slowly or quickly) striking the aforesaid Paderborn cathedral. I'll outline the results below, for the Space Strike Shiverers. If you live near the Vatican, or the Rev. Sun Moon or (worse) Jerry Falwell, your mileage (and megatonnage) may vary.

Mjollnir : was Thor's Hammer in Norse Mythology, and I chose Mjollnir as my first worked example. Made of iron, one foot in diameter, Mjollnir is known for coming back like a boomerang. So I assumed that Thor threw Mjollnir so hard that it almost went into near-earth orbit (11 km/sec) and came around 88 minutes later, hitting the cathedral squarely. Earth gets hit thus about once a month. The resulting crater was 40 meters across but the fireball was below the horizon as seen from our house. The seismic shock (3.6 seconds later) here was 0.7 on the Richter scale and so could not even be felt. The airblast came 60 seconds later and was easily heard at 37 dB.

Asteroid : A porous rock of 10 meter diameter coming in at the 17 km/sec typical of asteroids impacted like 27 kilotons TNT. Earth gets hit every 7 years by something like this. The crater was 428 meters across, and the fireball had 90% of the sun's brightness. The major seismic shaking arrived at approximately 3.6 seconds, with a Richter Scale Magnitude of 3.5 so it was felt indoors. Hanging objects swung. Vibration like passing of light trucks, i.e. may not be recognized as an earthquake. Standing motor cars rocked. Windows, dishes, doors rattled. Glasses clinked. Crockery clashed. Wooden walls and frames creaked. One minute later the air blast came with max wind velocity: 3.9 m/s = 8.6 mph and 65 dB (Loud as heavy traffic).

Comet : A 100 meter ball of ice entering the atmosphere at comet-typical 51 km/sec impacts with 163 megatons. Earth gets a hit like this every five and a half thousand years. The crater was 2.63 kms across and the fireball 22 times brighter than the sun. Seismic activity of 6.1 on the Richter scale means :- Difficult to stand. Noticed even by drivers of US motor cars. Hanging objects quiver. Furniture broken. Damage to masonry D, including cracks. Weak chimneys broken at roof line. Fall of plaster, loose bricks, stones, tiles, cornices (also unbraced parapets and architectural ornaments). Some cracks in masonry C. Waves on ponds; water turbid with mud. Small slides and caving in along sand or gravel banks. Large bells ring. Concrete irrigation ditches damaged. Steering of motor cars affected. Damage to masonry C; partial collapse. Some damage to masonry B; none to masonry A. Fall of stucco and some masonry walls. Twisting, fall of chimneys, factory stacks, monuments, towers, elevated tanks. Frame houses moved on foundations if not bolted down; loose panel walls thrown out. Decayed piling broken off. Branches broken from trees. Changes in flow or temperature of springs and wells. Cracks in wet ground and on steep slopes. BTW, masonry ABC and D are defined as follows (there's no masonry in Paderborn, which is too catholic for that :-)

• Masonry A. Good workmanship, mortar, and design; reinforced, especially laterally, and bound together using steel, concrete, etc.; designed to resist lateral forces.
• Masonry B. Good workmanship and mortar; reinforced, but not designed in detail to resist lateral forces.
• Masonry C. Ordinary workmanship and mortar; no extreme weaknesses like failing to tie in at corners, but neither reinforced nor designed against horizontal forces.
• Masonry D. Weak materials, such as adobe; poor mortar; low standards of workmanship; weak horizontally.

The air blast was loud at 96 dB (causing ear pain) and the wind came with 104 m/s (233 mph). Multistory wall-bearing buildings collapsed. Wood frame buildings almost completely collapsed. Glass windows shattered. Up to 90 percent of trees were blown down; remainder stripped of branches and leaves. And remember, this was 18 kms away from ground zero.

Ragnarok : Otherwise known as the Götterdämmerung, or Armageddon in the Jewish mythology, the REAL Lucifer's hammer. I assumed a 10 km diameter dense rock coming dark-winging in from the Oort clouds achieving 72 km/sec (that's the max speed for objects coming from a solar orbit). Ragnarok impacts with ten to the ninth megatons. Earth gets an impact like this every thousand million years. The crater was 273 kms (170 miles) across, and our position was inside the transient crater and so we were vaporised and ejected upon impact; so when Hell arrives, at least it's over quickly. So that's all for today, folks!

P.S. If you want to do your own impact analyses, the link is here.
P.P.S : This is being blogged by Fenris today :-)

posted by Stu Savory on 27th April 2004 at 09:20 Central European Time permalink

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World Book day

Shopping : Friday was world book day; so what book(s) did YOU buy ?

Last week I happily joined in the many cerebrations of TV turnoff week. No, that's not a typo, I DID mean to type an R and not an L :-)
During that week I finally got around to reading Thomas Pychon's Gravity's Rainbow, ISBN 0-099-53321-9. Whilst it was good, I didn't think it was as good as the rave revues suggested. 7 out of 10. I was going to write a mini-review on my "english books-read" pages when I noticed that I haven't maintained these - neither in English nor in German - for a year now. So tough luck, I don't have the time to catch up!

So what books did I buy? I went the whole hog, splashing out on 5 (one per TV-less working day), before my pocket money ran out.

These five books are :-

• Bloody Mary by Tom Sharpe, 1995, in the German translation published by Goldmann Verlag, with ISBN 3-442-30682-5. I've always enjoyed Sharpe's great sense of humour, so I chose this book based on the author's name alone. Camilo would like it in English.

• The Snowflake, photos by Patricia Rasmussen, 2003, Voyageur Press, with ISBN 0-89658-630-8. Impulse buy after flipping through the magnificent close-up photos of snowflakes. A must for any photographer bloggers/geeks. One for Joel, this!

• Action this Day! edited by Michael Smith and Ralph Erskine, 2001, in Bantam Press. ISBN 0-593-04910-1. As most of you know, I'm a crypto-geek, and this book is about Bletchley Park, from the breaking of the Enigma Code in WW2 to the birth of the modern computer (BP's Colossus and GCHQ). Riri might like it too.

• Sein und Zeit by Martin Heidegger, 11th edition 1967. This is a heavily philosophical book, which I saw in a second-hand book store. I snapped it up when I noticed that it bore an ex libris stamp from a recently deceased famous local professor of philosophy, who had annotated it thoroughly in the margins! Yule might slog through this one too.

• Buch ohne Titel by Raymond Smullyan, 1983, also second-hand. This is the German translation of "This book needs no title", and is a short collection of paradoxa; very amusing, read its 134 pages already! To stay in this week's meme, page 23, sentence 5, translates as "I don't really know what you expect of me", which sums up my feelings every time I write this blog ;-) It'd blow Elaine's weatherwaxed mind, too.

These 5 now bring us up to a grand total of 7002 books in our house-library (6994 read, eight written), which probably represents over half the books in our village (pop ~600).

Beers for the Boys : I don't want the fans of The Preznit to go away today with the idea that this is some kind of innerlekshul, librul blog, so let me add a redneck component today :-)
Yes folks, I confess that I've got a beer gut, keep a bulldog, an' like to swill down a beer or three. Does that qualify me? Let me add that Friday was also German beer day!

Lets play some number games for the beer fans. It is reported that Germany has 1283 breweries, making beer in accordance with the 1516 Reinheitsgebot (purity law). Let us assume that they make an average of (only) 5 types of beer at each brewery. That makes roughly 6000 beers I have to try. As a true redneck (cf. the beer gut) I am obliged to offer a qualified opinion about which is the best beer, which is the second best, third, etc, etc. So I have to rank these 6000, without letting Diebold do the counting :-) Assume I can reliably rank six each day, performing a confirmatory ranking of these 6 on another day to check for statistical significance, it'll take me 2000 days to pick the top 1000 beers. Then 333 days to pick the top 167, etc. etc. So after about 2600 days (about 7 years) I'd be able to rank all the German beers for you. Now I'm 60 this year and given my life expectancy with all those beers over the next seven years, I'd better get started right now! Have an iced daze, USA rednecks!

posted by Stu Savory on 25th April 2004 at 07:20 Central European Time permalink

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Rage, rage against the dying of the byte!

Valedictory : One of our old machines - "Zweistein" - is gradually giving up the ghost. Grinding noises from the disc and increasing head crashes are signalling impending departure. "Zweistein" is/was a 200 MHz, 64 MB, Win95, 20GB, 1997 vintage box. So I went down to the store and bought some new bits(sic!) and pieces as cheaply as possible (500 € = 600 bucks), and spent the last two days putting them all together to create Fenris :-

• 300 Watt miditower
• ASROC main board with 6*USB 2.0, VGA, LAN, Audio on board
• AMD XP2600+
• 2 * 256 MB DDR RAM
• HDD 80GB 7200rpm
• CD RW 52x
• Floppy
• Win XP Pro and Linux

I split the disc into two, so I can boot a Linux partition for me but we can also boot an XP partition if we want to. The time consuming stuff however, is installing all the SW we have gotten used to over the years. This is to save weeks needed to learn other interfaces.

Our soul of a new machine : Starting a naked machine leaves you wide open on the web. I booted XP first and turned its firewall on, installed the modem and downloaded AntiVir first then the Sygate personal firewall (which we prefer), finally Lavasoft's Ad-Aware (all freeware); then I installed these three and rebooted. In that short space of time FOUR spyware components had inserted themselves, before I could get my defenses up! But Ad-Aware found and removed them. Then there was a long evening haul downloading the 31 pieces of freeware to which we have become accustomed (XP is the only MS SW on the box) and installing all of those. Now I have to back up all our own data from "Zweistein" and move them over to "Fenris".

Spring Clean : While I am still motivated by the sheer speed of the new HW, I've decided to do a spring clean of the website. We get about 150 spams daily, caught by my Bayesian spam-filter, but nevertheless annoying. So I'm going to go through our 300+ web pages and remove every single occurrence of our Email address, replacing them with a graphical logo version thereof. This means that you will no longer me able to click on a mail to link to email me, but will have to type in the address from the logo :- . Sorry, but you can thank the spammers for that. However, this means that spambots won't find our Email address on the website, which I hope will lead to a decrease in the number of spams in the long run. To start off, I did the blog and all blog-archives last night, see top of the sidebar.

Dylan Thomas : If you thought that today's headline sounded vaguely familiar, here is an original tip for you : Do not go gentle into that good night !

posted by Stu Savory on 23rd April 2004 at 06:20 Central European Time permalink

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The whole world turns around YOU!

Narcissism and egomania : Me, me, me, me, me, me, me. Either an italian tenor tuning up or sheer egomania. A fascination with oneself. The Greeks had a word for them : Narcissists. The Romans numbered them, 150. A pathological condition of people who think the whole world turns around THEM.

Surprisingly, this turns out to be true. The whole world does turn around YOU (whoever you are), as I was able to prove mathematically to an prime example of the species at a party. Quite typical for egoists, he didn't even notice that I was teasing him ;-)

The proof : Consider yourself standing on some latitude at point X - see the sketch - anywhere in the northern hemisphere. Depending on your degree of egomania this could be the oval office, Jerusalem, the vatican or whatever (pace, Mike Golby, the same argument applies in the southern hemisphere too, but with the picture [see left] inverted). Now the Earth rotates west to east at the equator at 1000 mph. In my sketch I chose the latitude of point X arbitrarily so that X rotates west to east at 500 mph. At some distance south of X the world has a latitude spinning at 600 mph and at some distance north at 400 mph. Relative to X, the southern latitude is moving right at 100 mph (600-500) and the northern latitude is moving LEFT at 100 mph (500-400), the directions shown by the arrows in the sketch. In fact the distribution of relative horizontal speeds of ALL points around point X is the same as if you drew a circle rotating around point X. Just stay away from the poles and the equator.
So, the whole world rotates around YOU, whoever you are! QED. Nice to know, huh? :lol:

Me, me, me? No. Personally I prefer being part of a team of like-minded, really close friends.

Book 23/5 meme : From Caterina I picked up the following meme, now doing the rounds:-

1. Grab the nearest book. 
2. Open the book to page 23. 
3. Find the fifth sentence. 
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.

Well, dear Caterina, I'm afraid to say that the nearest book was a Richard. P. Feynman text on Quantumelectrodynamics,

QED : the strange theory of light and matter.
Richard P. Feynman, Princeton University Press, 1985
ISBN : 0-691-02417-0, paperback, 7th printing 1988.

And the embarrassing thing is that page 23 doesn't have a 5th sentence. In fact it has only five lines - the first part of the first sentence (ends on page 24)! - the rest of page 23 being 42(sic!) lines of footnotes overflowing from page 22.

I guess we nerds sometimes break the memes. Sorry!

posted by Stu Savory on 18th April 2004 at 16:50 Central European Time permalink

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Non nobis, Domine . . .

Busharon : Oh well done, Dubya! In one short (for which we are grateful) speech you managed to unite the world's anti-americans and anti-semites, pissing off the UNO again and irritating your GB ally, Tony Bliar. Most Europeans don't agree with Sharon's Israeli policies in any way or form. But Busharon really do drive extremists into the ranks of al Quaeda etc.

Jews : Doug and Joel both gave me the tip that the anti-semites are Google-bombing the word Jew, so that even Google have put up a special page explaining what happened. Doug asked for a definition of Jew; mine is recursive:- A Jew is either Eve or the child of a jewish mother. Lilith doesn't even get into their version, nor into the Catholic version of Genesis. Fortunately I have a Gnosis in my library, avoiding this particular censorship by both religions.

CIA boss Tenet : was caught lying to the 911 commission, denying the fact that he had had several meetings with Dubya before 911 about the Al Quaeda issue. Of course Dubya had plenty of warnings about 911 and did nothing about them and is now trying to weasel out of his reponsibilities! What did you expect? Honesty??

Hollywood : is rewriting the history of World War II again! After the movie U-571, (about US sailors who capture the Germans' Enigma codebook, when it was really the Brits' Royal Navy) and the movie The Great Escape (in which Americans dominate the prison camp breakout, whereas in fact they had all been moved to another camp before the escape took place), and the movie Private Ryan (which hardly mentioned the 72,000 British and Canadian troops involved in the D-Day landings), the Hollywood moguls are now planning a movie about how Billy Fiske - a forgotten american athlete - single-handedly won the Battle of Britain. The facts are : Fiske was one of only 12 Americans among 2,945 airmen in the battle in the summer of 1940, and had no confirmed 'kills'. Indeed he was shot down and killed after only a month, albeit the first American to die in uniform in WW2.

Given this Hollywood tradition of lying about how 'Merkins saved the world single-handedly, and given that Dubya likes to watch movies & TV, is it any wonder that he thinks he can conquer the world and win the crusades and even regain the golden fleece all in (hopefully) one short term as unelected usurper? But George W. keeps flying the flag :-(

posted by Stu Savory on 16th April 2004 at 10:10 Central European Time permalink

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A Coffee shop tip for Flagstaff, Arizona.

On Wednesday Camilo was blogging about Colombian Coffee. It got me thinking about some of the great coffee bars I've been in. Now I don't mean dutch coffee bars, famous more for the marihuana they sell than their coffee (e.g. The Bulldog, in Amsterdam). Nor the Mocca which our kurdish apprentice makes, so strong that the wide-eyed spoon stands up straight in it. BTW, "Mocca" is the name of a harbour town in Yemen which used to ship most of their coffee exports; don't know if it still does.

I prefer Italian style coffee, Espresso or Cappucino, though of late I've been enjoying the subtle Latte Macchiato. And I'd like to give my stateside blogreaders a tip. Forget Starbucks. The best coffeeshop in the whole of the United States is in Flagstaff, Arizona. It belongs to Tim Macy, and is called (duh!) Macy's. It's a little one-story green-painted wooden building, right next to a coin-op laundry, if my memory serves me correctly. There is only the one shop, it's not a chain like Starbucks. Macy's is at 14 South Beaver Street; about 1 1/2 blocks south of the tracks on Beaver Street, on the left side, I seem to remember (it's been a while!). Kinda cool place too, lots of college students and the very occasional foreign visitor (me :-)

What makes them so special and their coffee so good? Macy's roast their own coffee beans right there on the premises and serve the Espresso with a magnificent Crema. If you US guys and gals live anywhere near Flagstaff (Arizona) please do go there. Look around the place, inhale the scent of the roasting coffee and enjoy a really good cup. And say Hi to Tim, telling him he has a great fan in Germany :-)

That moron Dubya : is now planning to build a biological weapons laboratory in the middle of downtown Boston (Mass). Sure makes an effective target for the next Al Quaeda plane to dive into. That'd make everyone a lot Sadr, fer sure. George W. Bush fer coffee, please! Apropos WMDs, Al Jazeera TV alleges that the US is secretly importing WMD and hiding them in southern Iraq. One presumes this is so that Dubya can announce their 'discovery' just before the election in november. That's the best conspiracy theory I've heard this week :-)

In her birthday suit : Lest I miss you on Friday, Happy Birthday tomorrow, Liz Lawley!

posted by Stu Savory on 15th April 2004 at 06:06 Central European Time permalink

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The long way around, 43 years ago

Puck was over twice as fast, according to one William Shakespeare, who wrote Puck's immortal words "I will put a girdle round the Earth in forty minutes" (Act II, Scene I). But of course, that was only a dream.
A midsummer night's dream.

The first person to actually orbit the Earth, way back on 12th April 1961, was Juri Gagarin, pictured here in his working clothes, blasted off at 9:07 for that first orbit. This was weeks before the US managed to lob Shepard into what was merely a sub-orbital flight.

I remember that day clearly; there was a brief announcement by TASS, the russian press agency, writing that Gagarin had orbited the earth in a 5 ton orbiter named Vostok (which means East). TASS wrote that Gagarin had achieved a maximum altitude of 187.75 miles and a minimum of 109.50 miles, and that each orbit around the earth took 89.10 minutes.

Juri Alexejewitsch Gagarin was born on 9th March 1938 in a small farming village about 100 miles from Moscow. He died young in the crash of his Mig-15 jet on a training flight on 27th March 1968. He certainly put his stamp on history.

posted by Stu Savory on 12th April 2004 at 06:06 Central European Time permalink

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Drive to find Megadeath WMDs!

No, of course you didn't hear Kinda-Sleazy mention WMDs at all. After all, no WMDs have been found in Iraq; so the administration of Bush the Lesser made a preemptive strike, starting an unjustified war. Even Powell said as much last week.

But we all knew that already, so lets talk about WMD today. What are WMD? WMD are technical devices (ABC or whatever) that cause massive death counts. When the Aum sect used Sarin in the japanese subway system it caused tens of deaths and hundreds of injured. Sarin is a chemical WMD, easily synthesised (right, Carl?), but hard to disperse widely.

On 9-11 Al Quaeda terrorists flew fully fueled airplanes into the WTC. The poor man's guided missile, conventional warhead, effectively about one kiloton of energy. Conventional transport used as WMD. 3,000 people killed and many others injured.

So what would you say to a conventional transport which achieves over a million dead and ten times as many injured? That's WMD. World Motoring Deaths. Over 1.2 million people are killed in road traffic accidents around the world each year. Another 50 million people may be left injured by crashes annually. More than 3,000 people are killed in road accidents every day. Every day is like 9-11 as far as these numbers are concerned. Drive safely!

It is of course well known that the country with the most WMD is the USA. The most chemical weapons, the most biological weapons, the most nuclear weapons. Friday, Doug Alder wrote that "US foreign policy is causing a large percent of the conflicts around the world today". How long before Dubya decides to use his WMD arsenal? Dubya must go, he's too dangerous!

So, combining today's two themes, I took a look at the GIs' motoring accident rate here in Germany. At the US Airbase in Spangdahlem, fights in discos und bars, alcohol and drunken driving are over triple the local level. Indeed, the local police say that every third accident is a drunk-driving US soldier. Some can't take the German beer which is stronger than the frozen US ratpiss they're used to. Others may prefer to be sent home in disgrace rather than be shipped to Iraq as Dubya's cannon fodder (over 650 US dead), I surmise. After all, the Commander -in-Chief has a record as a drunken driver too, and gets to stay in the US.

Barely a day or two have gone by and the lies Kinda-Sleezy told are already being uncovered. A memo, entitled "Bin Laden determined to attack inside the United States", came to light during last Thursday's testimony to the 9/11 commission from Kinda-Sleazy. This report was given to President Bush on 6 August 2001, as part of his necessary daily dose of intelligence.
Jungian synchronicity? Coincidence? : You remember 6th of August, don't you? No? The people of Hiroshima do. The day the first nukulah WMD was used on unsuspecting civilians.

Bush basically ignored the August 6 report. One more reason to get rid of Dubya in 2004.

posted by Stu Savory on 11th April 2004 at 07:10 Central European Time permalink

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The Hare of the Dog, that Bitch, Me :-)

Happy Easter, blogreaders; today's blog-entry is more photo-oriented than usual.

Proxy Germanica revisited : On thursday, a mail from a student at the Adlai E. Stevenson High School, asking permission to use my photo of Sleeping Beauty's castle. That is the Sababurg, just some 40 miles from where I live. Permission was granted. Then on Good Friday we decided to help more. We drove the 44 miles to another castle out of Grimms' Fairy Tales, the Trendelburg. That is the castle of Rapunzel, the girl who let her hair down (pun intended), to let her lover climb the tower to her room! So Gleb, you may use that photo too for your grim(m) school project :-)

We took the dogs for an exhausting walk through the local forest there, then took lunch in Castle Trendelburg's excellent restaurant, whence the clickable thumbnail photo of this blogentry was taken. After several beers or four, I gave the photo the title : The Hare of the Dog, that Bitch, Me ;-)

FYI : The original Proxy Germanica posts about the Sababurg were on 9 & 23/9/2003.

posted by Stu Savory on 10th April 2004 at 06:50 Central European Time permalink

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Riding the corporate dead horse . . .

My biker friend Helmi Fischer is one neat girl, who has a really Dilbertesque sense of humour. She forwarded me a powerpoint slide show (in German) which I have merely translated here for your delectation. If anyone knows who the original author is, I'd be pleased to add an attribution, giving credit where it is due.

The infinite, simple, wisdom of the Dakota Indians declares :-
"When you notice you are riding a dead horse, dismount!"

But in large corporations these days, other strategies are used. They . . .

• ... use a bigger whip
• ... swap riders around
• ... claim they've always ridden like that
• ... set up a working committee to analyse the horse
• ... visit other large companies, to see how they ride dead horses
• ... raise the quality standard for riding dead horses
• ... set up a taskforce to resuscitate the dead horse
• ... import expensive consultants who are really good at riding dead horses
• ... proscribe intensive riding lessons for top management
• ... write a comparative study of dead horses
• ... change the definition of 'dead'
• ... harness together several dead horses to get to a solution faster
• ... publicly declare that no horse can be so dead that their company can't ride it
• ... establish a quality circle to find a secondary use for dead horses
• ... set up a separate cost centre for dead horses (unit of currency : 1 pony)
• ... give the dead horse increased responsibilities and authority
• ... finally, perform major restructuring, so that another dept. gets the dead horse!

I liked Helmi's list so much, I've added three suggestions of my own. If you have some new ones too, mail them to me for blogging here!

• ... have HR (horse riders) dept. set up a Motivation Program for ALL dead horses
• ... make a spreadsheet : dead horses outsourced to India would be less expensive
• ... hold a press conference declaring that their dead horse is cheaper (eats less hay), has a nicer saddle and is more reliable (less skitty) than the Open Source live horse.

posted by Stu Savory on 8th April 2004 at 08:40 Central European Time permalink

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Tee Vee Blues

Last friday our 16 year old TV set got the blues. That is, it only showed the blue channel. OK, OK, OK, I do NOT mean just p0rn! I mean it didn't show any other colours, just the CRT's blue gun seemed to be working. Since we wanted to see Schumi win on sunday, we needed to see red (or orange, if you believe Meg). So I called the trusty tradesman in the neighbouring village's electronics shop, saying maybe after 16 years we needed a new TV. He explained that Germany is switching over to digital TV from analog. So - the wife's birthday coming up - we treated ourselves to a digital converter (set-top box). WOW! Gone are the snowy analog satellite-dish pix with nominally 45 channels (actually only 30, the rest were duplicates).

" an obese, poly-ester-clad, sweaty, chickenwalking televangelist right out of the fire and brimstone bible stereotype "

Welcome to 255 channels (136 TV, 119 radio). Programs I've never even seen before. Al Jazeera is at one end of the spectrum (not that I can understand the speech). At the other end is the GOD channel, a fundamentalist christian US channel, replete with an obese, polyester-clad, sweaty, chickenwalking televangelist right out of the fire and brimstone bible stereotype catalogue. Whooo Hey! Vengeance is mine saith the lord and you gotta vote for Dubya or y'all die bold in Hell! Almost as bad as the brainwashing teleshopping garbage.

Between these two extremes we can now get UK programs like Sky and a couple of BBC programs, all of the french, swiss and austrian channels : these I can understand. We also get italian, polish, portuguese and spanish. Moroccan too. And Vatican radio to counterpoint the GOD channel on TV. Been going through the radio channels on sunday evening, but I couldn't find Bart radio, more's the pity, to balance the Rush Limbo/Fox TV fascist junk.

Why did I shop at the neighbouring village?, I hear you ask. First answer, I wanted to support a service-providing local business selling quality German goods too, instead of some serviceless anonymous hypermarket hawking korean krap, even if it is 10% cheaper there. Buying german helps keep jobs in this country too. If y'all insist on buying cheapo asian/indian/rumanian wares, you shouldn't wonder when our jobs get outsourced there too. Second answer : Our own village is kinda small. It has one mom-and-pop store (a bakery), one sleepy pub, and - for real entertainment - a catholic church and a graveyard. Quiet? Yeah! Probably so quiet it has a negative dB count; this one goes to MINUS eleven, Nigel!

via Mercurial : Not only he, I too am a Grammar God!
To Hell with monotheism, You Have Wimpy Heroes!

posted by Stu Savory on 6th April 2004 at 06:00 Central European Time permalink

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My flabber is ghasted : Thankyou!

Gissajob : Barely had I blogged on thursday that I'm jobhunting and asked for your help, and several jumped in to help me. Some linked to my gissajob permalink (thanks!) and I got three mails and a phone call with hot tips (which I'll keep for myself until I know how they turn out). Thanks you four, you know who you are! Nevertheless, I won't be applying for the job of India Transfer Coordinator (that firm can't get anyone internal, which doesn't surprise me), because it would only be putting more in the ranks of the unemployed here. I will be following up the tips in Frankfurt and Duisberg. The UK tip? Probably not. We don't want to relocate abroad.

Two other mails brought interesting suggestions : one guy who read my biker stuff (the novel and the webpages etc) suggested I apply for a job as motorcycling journalist. Hadn't thought of that, but they'd probably think I'm too old (though still pretty fast). Franziska suggests looking for IT-security jobs, given my background. Been 17 downloads of my CV already.

Thankyou, dear friends, keep those job tips coming in please!

Small world : Forty years ago I was reading physics at City University, London, UK. Then working at G.E.C's Stanmore research labs. Out of the blue I got an email von David Pickett, who did exactly the same career steps just two years later. How powerful the Internet is, to reconnect two people after nearly forty years; again I'm flabberghasted! David, however, did a complete career change and became a conductor (of orchestras, not buses or electricity), as you can all read on his website. It appears to my pun(n)y brain that all those years ago he made a sharp, key decision; must have been a "C change" ;-)

Stone of Destiny : Sadly, I report the death of one of my boyhood heroes, Gavin Vernon, in Canada, aged 77. He and 3 others regained the scottish thronestone (which Edward Longshanks had stolen in 1296 AD) and returned it to Scotland. A major scandal for the lax authorities in England in 1950. Schadenfreude entered my vocabulary. Here's the story.

Blogfriends : Lest I forget on monday, hippy-pappy bithuthiday, Michael!

posted by Stu Savory on 4th April 2004 at 06:00 Central European Time permalink

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Left Out : Pink Slip Day :-(

Yesterday was pink slip day or blue letter day, as we call it here in Germany, with the SW-house whom I'm currently with now laying off IT-consultants due to insufficient contracts :-(

So. I'm now jobhunting! Any help, contacts, pointers etc. would be appreciated.

I'm looking for a job as a CIO, CTO, IT-consultant, project manager, quality geek (ISO 9000ff), writer, flying instructor, cryptographer, loose cannon or whatever, beginning 1st July 2004. Preferably within an hour's commuting time of Paderborn Germany (i.e. a circle including Dortmund, Bielefeld, Kassel, Winterberg). I'll be grateful for your tips and hints. This is not an April Fools' joke, would that it were, for the economy is crappy and still headed downhill.

I've written a CV (PDF, in German) and put a link to it into the sidebar, under my photo.
Done the same with a bilingual list of my publications too. FWIW: IQ still runs >= 135, OK?

How about a new meme for the blogosphere? Help get Stu a job! (e.g link to the permalink).

posted by Stu Savory on 1st April 2004 at 06:00 Central European Time permalink

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