On a Trip

Proxy Bavaria : As a variation of the theme Proxy Germanica referred to earlier this month, a latent drunk from the USA who shall remain nameless (that OK, Karl?) asked me to visit the Octoberfest next month. BTW, Proxy Germanica is "field-trips-on-request" to let you live here in Germany by proxy as it were. Well no-can-do on this one, Karl :-(
The Octoberfest is held down in Munich in Bavaria which is some 400 miles away, to far for me just to pop down there. So here is the link to an Octoberfest website instead. And by the way, the Octoberfest is held (mainly) in September, to the confusion of many tourists who arrive a couple of weeks too late!

A walk on the Wilde side: Went to a reading at a local bookstore yesterday lunchtime. Special of the day was the famous gay irishman Oscar Wilde. I just loved the quotations that were read out :) Anybody can make history; only a great man can write it he wrote. There is a neat website too, I learned, which generates a random quotation by Oscar Wilde each time that you visit it.

posted by Stu Savory on 30th September 2003 at 04:22 Central European Time ;)

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Weekend Blogscan

How do you blog? : Nancy complained on Sept. 14 thus:-

Where is the automatic "from my brain to the blog" plugin 
(thought recognition software)? I think some people think I 
don't want/like to blog or I don't have time or something, 
when actually I have tons of posts written in my head, but 
no time to actually get them out. :\

So do all you folks type everything in? Does no'one (else) use voice recognition ? It lets you get your thoughts written down quickly, then all you have to do is add the emphasis, italics, links and photos. I recommend the SW from Dragon. Mind you, you will need to calibrate it for each language you use (I usually write in German and/or in English) and not hop about between languages in the same article. And it really couldn't cope when I dropped a little swedish pun into this blog last week (see articles headed 'Skog Blanning'). It has problems with homonyms too.

Shutdown : Sadly, Trent's Music Heaven has shut down, due to too much (expensive) site traffic. I should be so lucky.

Get on down! : Back on Friday, September 26, brykMantra was dreaming about flying in the Alps. So I'll just point him to the not-so-easy visual approach into the Meribel altiport, about which I blogged on May 17th, and wish a safe landing :-)

Everything Burns : Another one of Jim's hilarious postings about his encounter with the driving examiner. Go read the entry in his blog dated 21st September!

Congratulations: Over at Mandarin Design - purveyors of high quality HTML to Blogtopia - Meg & Rob have become grandparents.

Zex Myth #2 : Lynn has a neat little remark in her blog on Thursday, September 25. Here's a Real Myth For You, Guys.

What rough beast : On friday Becky alleged " I'm finally finished my research work in English Religious Poetry". I wonder if this includes W.B.Yeats "Second Coming" (see my blog dated May 28th). Bet it doesn't ! Go on, Becky, surprise your teacher by adding it!

posted by Stu Savory on 29th September 2003 at 05:21 Central European Time ;)

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Feeling Puny

Hamlet : Let's wrap up this weak(sic!) of puns and typos with a little poem by the late, great, goon Mister Spike Milligna (the well-known typing mistake ) :-

Said Hamlet to Ophelia,
'I'll do a sketch of thee,
What kind of pencil shall I use,
2B or not 2B?'
 

posted by Stu Savory on 28th September 2003 at 13:47 Central European Time ;)

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Gut feelings

Great Typo of the week : Back on Monday (22nd) I told you about a village to the south of Cambridge (UK) with the gut-wrenching name of Shellow Bowells.

Back on Tuesday (23rd) Agnete remonstrated with me for making multilingual puns. Nevertheless I cannot resist showing you this magnificent typographical error, made in a caption below a society photo in a french magazine. Agnete, I think I don't need to translate this one, OK ?

Steganography : As my regular blog-readers know, I'm a cryptography geek. Cryptography comes from the Greek and means secret writing. But my crypto pages are all in German. (They are worldwide the number one pages on Chiffriergeräte according to Google :-) Several of you have written asking for translations, but that's a lot of effort, so go read my friend F.L.Bauer's book Decrypted Secrets instead please. It's a really good translation into English, and one of the periods is a microdot!

Now one of the ways to hide a secret message is not to encipher it, but to hide it out there in plain sight. That is called Steganography. This split photo (left=wide angle, right=zoomed) shows a magnificent example (sadly I do not know the photographer to credit him/her). I guess that John died maybe of AIDS after infecting his friends, who then erected this californian headstone :-) Must of been something like that, I don't know though. Click on the photo to zoom in, if you like.

posted by Stu Savory on 25th September 2003 at 06:47 Central European Time ;)

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Gathers no moss

Gathers no moss : is - of course - the name of a rock'n'roll music magazine from an alternate, parallel universe to ours. Their world cannot overlap ours, because the shared guitar strings are made from catgut. But it was Schrödingers cat. I am sure, however, that Gather no moss has a better taste in music than the similar magazine in our own universe. And so is Ozzy Stillbourne of Metal Sludge (many thanks go to Frank Paynter for the link). I too have a list of my favorite guitarists entitled Guitarissimo (Vai do you ask?) and this one goes to eleven, in the words of Nigel!

Spinal Tap : And whilst we're talking about him, how come Nigel Tufnell isn't on their list anyway? I asked myself, 'whatever did happen to Spinal Tap' ? So I surfed over to Amazon and - lo and behold - after a 16 year delay, there is a second video called (not unexpectedly) "The return of Spinal Tap". Amazon excelled themselves, the video arrived yesterday and I spent the evening watching it. Great! Really hilarious spoof-taking of the rock'n'roll scene. I laughed till tears came. And the music ain't TOO bad either. Go get yourselves a copy. Headbanging included free :-)

Poetry : It was Frank too that provided the link to The Wondering Minstrels, a huge anthology of good poems (more than 1350). My own list of favourite poems is much shorter, just 32. However, mine does not include the good ship Venus :-)

posted by Stu Savory on 24th September 2003 at 06:17 Central European Time ;)

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Skog Blanning revisited

Skog Blanning revisited : Agnete Thorsdottir, mailing from Sweden, points out that the subtle pun I made in the swedish headline which I wrote yesterday would not be understood by many monolingual (US/UK?) readers, so I should explain it. She thinks she misses some of the German/English puns too, I should explain them all she requests. I do with some, usually at the end of the day's postings.
Sorry Agnete. At least Ulrike, another blogreader of mine who also hails from Sweden, would have understood it :-)

So here goes. Skog means 'Forest' in English. Blanning I would translate as 'a blend'. So Skog Blanning means something like 'a forest blend' and refers to the photos of our short walk in the oak forest which I provided under that headline yesterday. I'll try to remember to explain the multilingual puns in future. It's malapropisms like these that make you realise you want to read Sheridan's The Rivals again:-)

Proxy Germanica revisited : A Miss Mbasa (aged 11, first name not given), mailing from a school in Zaire, takes me up on the rather vague Proxy Germanica offer that Gary Tuner and I were discussing on 9th of September (see my corresponding blog entry). She writes that she looked at the map showing where I live and her teacher said that it is near to the castles about which the Grimm brothers wrote in Grimm's Fairy Tales, which she is reading in school, and so would I send a photo of Sleeping Beauty's castle?

Well, young lady, it is indeed only 60 kilometers from where I live, so I went there at the weekend and took this photo (see photo on the left) for you. You can click in the little photo to see a bigger copy thereof. And 'new-granny' Meg wanted to know more about Germany, so she can click on it too :-) Sleeping Beauty was called Dornröschen (=little thorn rose) in German. The castle is called Sababurg and now houses an excellent if expensive restaurant and hotel. There is a large wild animal reserve in its grounds. Large by my standards, small by Miss Mbasa's Zaire standards, I expect.

posted by Stu Savoryon 23rd September 2003 at 06:17 Central European Time ;)

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Skog Blanning, a malapropism :-)

Skog Blanning: Britain has some very curious place names. I remember up at Cambridge that there are the infamous Christ's Pieces. And driving around just south of Cambridge one finds (I kid thee not!):- Hellions Bumpstead, Ugley, Rickinghall Inferior, Blo Norton, and for the never-constipated, Shellow Bowells. Nearby is the well-known Devil's Dyke (no relation to Hillary Rod 'em Clinton). Skog Blanning is not a nearby village, nor is it a swedish one - btw, both are swedish words - it's both a pun and a malapropism for :-

Blog scanning : Yesterday I was doing my early-morning sunday scan through the blogs on my blogroll and saw that Burningbird has some nice photos of a walk through her part of the woods. So that afternoon we went for a walk in Reinhardswald, an oak forest near where I live, with the digicam.

De Steen der Eigenwijzen seems happy with his simple new tap. We need to get him to watch the cult movie Spinal Tap. If you don't know the movie, go get yourself a copy on DVD or VHS. It's a really good rock & roll satire.

Frank Paynter was having trouble with my crypto pages, perhaps because they are in German. But all the worked examples use English as the foreign agents' language to be decoded, so he should be able to follow the decoding methods.

Simon Waldman has been getting hassle. Back in August he scanned a 65 year old article in House and Garden. It praised Hitler's house. The House and Garden publishers demanded he remove the scan for copyright reasons. Joi thinks that was OK. Simon acceeded (he operates under UK law). Had this been done in the US, the first amendment would have applied, and we'd still be able to read the scan.

Sympathies to all those US east coast bloggers who have other problems right now.

Finally, Mercurial points us to a report on last week's conference on the Space Elevator, which still may be achieved in my lifetime, although I'm 59 already :( . What I still don't understand about the Space Elevator is how/if it gets around basic physics. Whether a rocket or an elevator, you still have to apply energy to get you from the energy level at the earth's surface to the energy level in geosynchronous orbit. Or have I missed something?

posted by Stu Savoryon 22nd September 2003 at 06:17 Central European Time ;)

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Economics 101

Social systems explained, with simple examples :-)

Socialism : You have 2 cows. You must give one to your neighbour.

Communism : You have 2 cows. The government takes them from you and sells you the milk.

Fascism : You have 2 cows. The government takes them from you and shoots you.

EU-Burocracy : You have 2 cows. The government takes them from you, and kills one of them. The other is kept for its milk, which is destroyed.

An american corporation : They have 2 cows, so they sell one and force the other to work so hard, that it gives (at least) twice the milk. They are really, honestly, incredibly surprised when the cow dies of exhaustion.

A french corporation : They have 2 cows, so they go on strike to force the EU to give them a third.

A japanese corporation : They have 2 cows, so they redesign them. They are now 10 times smaller and give 20 times as much milk. They invent a clever milk-carton, call it "Cowkimon" and sell it successfully worldwide.

A german corporation : They have 2 cows, so they redesign them to last 1000 years (actually only 12), eat only once a month, and milk themselves. Then they pay the EU to destroy the milk and support the 3rd french cow instead.

A british corporation : They have 2 cows, both are mad.

An italian corporation : They have 2 cows, so they cut off their heads to put in someone's bed when they run out of horses. Then they milk the EU.

A russian corporation : They have 2 cows, so they decide to count them. Five. Do a recount. Forty two (pace Douglas Adams). Count again. Twentythree, ah, illumination. So give up and open a new bottle of vodka.

A swiss corporation : They have 2 thousand cows, none of which actually belong to them. So they take money from the owners for looking after them.

Traditional Capitalism : You have 2 cows. So you swap one for a bull. The herd grows and you retire on the interest.

Blogging : You have 2 cows. So you swap both for bulls. You produce only bullshit ;-)

posted by Stu Savory on 21st September 2003 at 06:17 Central European Time ;)

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Puzzling

Wet Bill : Red Zora came up with a nice puzzle last week. She found a handwritten bill in the gutter, on which the ink had run due to moisture getting at most of the digits on the bill. In fact, she could only read the multiplication sign (x) and one of the digits (a one). Nevertheless we could reconstruct all the numbers on the wet bill. Here is the wet bill, wherein the smudged digits are represented by an asterisk(*) and the leading spaces are represented by a tilde(~).

** x **
______
***
~***
____
****
~1**
_____
*****

Now you can try too. Don't mail me your answers, I know what the answer is. But you can mail me how long you took to get the answer. Let's see who is fastest!

posted by Stu Savory on 20th September 2003 at 13:27 Central European Time ;)

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Play Fair with Yvonne please!

Yvonne : Yvonne Bleischwitz is a young student of Maths at the nearby university of Paderborn. We worked together on a small crypto project recently. She has written - albeit in German - a pretty good layman's description of the Playfair cipher (as invented by the Brit physicist Lord Wheatstone) , describing how to make it and how to break it. She retains the copyright, but has given me permission to publish it unchanged on my crypto site. If you can read German, do go read her paper. It is easily understood; crypto for beginners. The Playfair cipher was even used by a certain - later US president - Lt. J.F.Kennedy (captain of PT109) in WW2.
Yvonne shows you how to break it. A clever young lass indeed!

Schmollo : My friend Schmollo, who currently has two VW New Beetles to drive (old red, new gray, as you can see in the morphing photo), has written a clever little text too. In it, he points out that the human brain can cope with transposition ciphers on the fly. So if some dyslexic (German) person for example wrote :- "luat enier sidtue an eienr elgnhcsien uvrsnäiett, ist es eagl in wcheler rhnfgeeloie die bstuchbaen in eniem wrot snid. das eniizg whictgie ist, dsas der etrse und der lztete bstuchbae am rtigeichn paltz snid. der rset knan tatol deiuranchnedr sien und man knan es ienrmomch onhe porbelm lseen. das legit daarn, dsas wir nhcit jeedn bstuchbaen aeilln lseen, srednon das wrot als gzanes." you would still be able to read it, as if it were plain language! Surprising what the human brain can do huh? (Dubya excepted).

NCC Fire : I hadn't realised how many blog readers I have. And no small number are motorcyclists too. So thank you all who wrote to me about my wednesday 17th blog entry, being upset about the fire at the National Motorcycle Museum in Birmingham, UK. Too many to thank individually, but you know who you are when you read this. Now go read the September 10 entry as compensation for the sadness :-)

E-Voting : Back on September 13 I was ranting about the security holes in E-Voting. Now the results of the security audit on the Diebold E-Voting software that I was ranting about are to made public, albeit in a sanitised form to prevent crackers breaking it wide open right now. Summary? Improvements are really necessary!"

posted by Stu Savory on 19th September 2003 at 05:57 Central European Time ;)

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National Motorcycle Museum fire :(

Catastrophe : The National Motorcycle Museum (Birmingham, UK) burnt down yesterday, losing 70% of the bikes :(

What a loss. Several of the bikes were unique, all in all it was a great British heritage. Luckily, some of us had had the chance to visit it in the last few years.
Here are the Photo sessions, they are the (first six photos of the) 2002 Manx GP report by Alex Prigge and myself and another visit report by Matthias Sander.

posted by Stu Savory on 17th September 2003 at 06:30 Central European Time ;)

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Here I stand; I cannot do otherwise

Politics : I've been getting some Flak due to my Nine Eleven blog entry, and have been asked - in very rude language - where I stand politically.

Let me point out that I sympathize in every way with those who lost loved ones in the 9-11-2001 terrorist attack. And with those (also 3000+) who lost loved ones in the terrorist attack of 9-11-1973. The point of the Nine Eleven blog entry was (is) to make us think about where anti-americanism arises. Because the 9-11-2001 attack was attributable to anti-americanism; Islam is merely incidental.

Everything has a cause. Let's take anti-semitism as an example. This has been going on since the middle ages - Shakespeare had his Shylock. Due to the New Testament episode where Jesus cast the money-lenders out of the temple, Christians were not allowed to lend money (or rather, take interest for doing so) during the middle ages. And so that task was left to the Jews who were despised for it. Hence Shylock and anti-semitism.

Back to anti-americanism. This is a post-WW2 phenomenon, in no small part due to the US invading countries and grabbing power, regardless of the inhabitants wishes. Allende's Chile was a case in point - thirty years ago to the day, as I pointed out. The US (CIA) assassination of Allende - they put the much despised right-wing Pinochet into power - caused widespread anti-americanism. Mercurial has some additional info. I mention this stuff because many bloggers are too young to remember the incident and I think they should understand the background. Bullying is never popular.

I was asked - obscenely - where I stand politically. If you look over on the left sidebar you can see three lines reading :-
Political Compass , Economic L/R: -1.62, Liberty/Authority: -2.56 . The horizontal axis is a scale -5 to +5 showing economic standpoints (left vs. right). The vertical axis is a scale -5 to +5 showing authoritarian (upper half) vs. libertarian (lower half) standpoints. So Hitler would have been top centre (fascism), Stalin top and leftmost, Ghandi lower left. Dubya is in the top right quadrant - far right, about half way up. If you follow the link Polit ical Compass you can take the test yourselves, to see where you stand politically. Now I'm kind of a pretty up-front guy, so I posted my Political Compass coordinates on the left sidebar. The picture today shows you where current world leaders stand. My numbers put me in more or less the same position as the Canadian Prime Minister Monsieur Jean Chretien. Where do you stand?

I would like to point you to Burning Bird's blog entries for September 9 and 10 for some current political commentary worth reading. And while you are about it, please read Michael Moore's book Downsize this! That is a position with which I can identify.

Note too, that the US has also been quite popular, depending on the particular administration. Kennedy was loved worldwide, and Carter was well-liked. Even - to a lesser extent - Clinton. However, other administrations were distrusted (Nixon) and disliked (Reagan). But Bush is really unpopular - even in the US.

This Bush administration annoys me daily. It's not just the bullying, the dog-wagging and the screwed-up US & world economy. Every single day they screw up anew. So what annoys me about the Bush administration today? The fact that they don't walk like they talk! Apparently it is not OK for Israel to want to assassinate the terrorist Arafat; of course the Israelis are Old Testament believers (an eye for an eye). But it is OK for the US to want to assassinate Saddam; but Bush is a New Testament believer (turn the other cheek). And it's the same guy saying both things. Hypocritter!

P.S.If you didn't recognise today's headline, it is the title of the famous speech at Worms by Martin Luther Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders!

posted by Stu Savory on 16th September 2003 at 06:06 Central European Time ;)

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e-Voting considered harmful

Who won really?

Let's discuss voting. In alleged democracies, if one party can manipulate the vote, then the results would show that he/she had "won". If all else fails, I suppose you could get the judiciary to appoint you instead of you just winning the vote (sic!).

How do elections work manually? Here in Germany, you get a postcard (PC) from the local town hall (keeper of the electoral role). If you expected to, but did not get a postcard, you need to find out why you are not on the electoral role. The Florida election 2000 showed how the electoral role can be manipulted to exclude those who might vote against you. The election postcards are numbered and checksummed.

On election day, you go to the assigned voting office (here, they are usually in schools etc, and the elections are at the weekend). The personnel there look you up on the role using the PC number. You then have to show your ID card or passport. Then you get a marker and voting slip, which you take into a voting cabin. The cabin's lower half is transparent so that the voting office personnel - usually one from each party - can see that there is noone else in the cabin with you. You vote by marking the voting slip with an indelible marker. You put the marked slip in an opaque envelope and leave the cabin. You can then put the (one) envelope through a slit into the vote collection box, under the eyes of the personnel. One man, one vote. And it needs no particular intelligence to understand what you have to do.

Upon leaving the site, you may be pestered by the press or party hacks, asking how you voted, so that they can do their predictions & respond accordingly. You are not obliged to answer, but some do. Losing-party hacks use this data to go find more of their traditional voters to get them to vote.

After the polls close - and only afterwards - are the vote-urns opened and the votes counted under the watchful eyes of all parties. Recounts mandatory if the differences are too small.

Voting Machines : In some countries and states voting machines have been introduced, allegedly to make the counting easier and faster (and cheaper). As we know from Florida 2000 elections, this isn't always true and manual recounts are made and there are discussions about voting slips which a machine may have not punched unambiguously. But at least there were voting slips to be checked manually. You still had to go to the polling station. And the manual mechanisms described above ensured that you only voted once.

e-Voting : The voting machine made by Diebold Election Systems of Ohio, US uses smart cards and proprietary code. However the code became publicly visible ( = Diebold screwed up) in July. The software code from the voting machine was downloaded from a non-public but unsecured part of Diebold's website and published on a website in New Zealand and security experts analysed it.

"Common voters, without any insider privileges, can cast unlimited votes without being detected by any mechanisms within the voting system," the researchers from Johns Hopkins University and Rice University in the US write in their paper. So I conclude that the code behind e-Voting systems should be made public so that it can be fully scrutinised by security experts. Enquiring minds want to know why the machines don't keep an audit trail (=paper printout slips). Enquiring minds also want to know who owns the voting machine companies, like Diebold. And who assigned them the supply contract.

The UK e-Voting experiments : Last May saw the UK's largest ever trial of e-voting. In English local elections over 1.5 million people in 18 local council areas were able to take part in voting trials by text message, Internet, electronic kiosk and, for the first time ever, digital TV. Many polling stations were without an Internet connection on polling day. As a result voters could get a vote at a polling station while still being able to vote again online from home (which is open to third-party influence, anyway!). A UK expert, Dr. Fairweather reports on questions of accessibility and technical glitches on election day.

California Schmu: In St. Luis Obispo there was an intermediate election tally that popped up on the Internet hours before polls closed. This is casting new doubts about the trustworthiness of electronic voting machines, especially with the CA recall coming up next month. Again it was Diebold that was the guilty party! In our quest to deliver faster, more accurate election results, we've left the voting process wide open to new forms of attack and mismanagement" claimed Kim Alexander, president of the California-based nonprofit California Voter Foundation. I second that.

Conclusion : In order to ensure true democracy, we need to get e-Voting right before we introduce it!

posted by Stu Savory on 13th September 2003 at 12:26 Central European Time ;)

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Back to normal

Mail up again :) Yesterday my mail was down due to a DDOSA (Distributed Denial of Service Attack) by SoBig.F, but things are back to normal now.

Left hand down a bit : I see that the captain of HMS Nottingham has pleaded guilty to doing an excellent imitation of Leslie Philips on radio's Around the Horne. Only the older Brits will understand the reference though.

Nine eleven : 11th September 2003 is an anniversary day. But one few will remember. 30 Years ago to the day the US CIA conspired to, funded and caused the overthrow of the (democratically elected) government of Salvador Allende.

posted by Stu Savory on 11th September 2003 at 13:44 Central European Time ;)

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The longest day :-)

Bike On! I like riding motorcycles, especially the longer tours. I currently have a Yamaha FJR1300. Thats a big (1300cc), comfortable, heavy(280 kg) but powerful (140 hp) tourer. Earlier this year I did the longest-day ride. This is a decentralised tour, with just five rules.

• Don't start before sunrise.
• Be home by sunset.
• Go at least 1000 kilometers.
• But you are not allowed to use the autobahn (=motorway).
• Document the ride.

This is the (b)log of the ride.

On the road again : So I choose a day [earlier this summer] (a Sunday, so there would be no lorries or trucks (HGVs) on the road) which the weather report predicts will be fine and not too hot and prepare the bike (but not fuelling it), equipment and myself and go to bed early. Up at four, light breakfast and on the road just after five am. 200 meters to the village's automated gas station, fuelling up and getting a timestamped (05:10am) receipt (documentation, geddit). The FJR has a 400+ km range, so I would need to refuel twice, so I had planned a triangular course. Leg 1 was Henglarn to Pottenstein in Bavaria, I know the roads in the area there from a previous trip to Pottenstein back in 2001.

Leg one : Roads empty at this time of day, so I am able to get a move on while cruising fast and watching the world wake up. Birds first, then cows, then paperboys, then dogs, then churchgoers driving sleepily to first mass. Leg 1 takes me 380 km before the reserve-warning bleeps at me and starts counting down. Just 4 km as it happens, to get to the pre-planned gas-station. Fuel at 9:31, having spent 4 hours 21 on the road. 88,6 km/h rolling average. Good going for roads with a speed-limit of 100, interspersed by villages (I avoid the towns).

Fill up the bike, getting the timestamped receipt and putting 23.4 liters in a 25 liter tank, so I had just 26 km reserve. That's cutting it too tight for a sunday morning usually. Next task is to empty me :) and drink a big bottle of water. Coffee or coke are NOT a good idea for long distance riding. Photograph the village name sign on the roadside with the bike (& its numberplate) in the photo too. Strip off a layer of clothing under the leathers. Nine whole minutes gone without moving! Take off 9:40 on leg 2.

The second leg is east to west, avoiding the sun in my eyes which had been annoying at the end of leg 1 which had been on a southeastern heading. Always plan your tours to keep the sun out of your eyes.

Leg two : is Pottenstein to Idar Oberstein. 355 km, 4 hours 22, rolling average is below 82, because the day-tripper traffic has built up during the morning. People going sightseeing and stopping for a sunday lunch. Sunday drivers, some of them. Yeough! Need to stay WIDE awake! But I am a bit tired, so I take a longer break, having a light salad for lunch and drinking another bottle of water.That's three liters of water so far, so I emptied me again too :) Have a short nap on the grass bank of the restauraunt parking lot too, having set my portable alarm to wake me after 45 minutes. Refuel, getting the timestamped receipt. Consumption on leg 2 only 5.8 l/h, probably due to the lower speed. Photograph the town limit sign, again with the bike in the pic. This time me too, thanks to a friendly pedestrian lady :)

Covered 385+355=740 km so far. Need 260 then, plus some (at least 50?) to account for the inevitable optimism that odometers always have. It's now 15:02. About six hours to sunset, so I'm well on track there, and about 300 km SSW of home, so the distance could be borderline. I decide to add a small detour. I'll go via Olpe and then to Korbach and home from there. That adds about 30 to 40 km. And besides, I know the road that way from Olpe on, so I'll pick up some speed if I need to, and can cut-across short if I'm on the safe side distance-wise.

Leg three : starts out fast, because all the day trippers are now in the cafes for coffee and cake :) But then they head for home, blocking the roads. I'm tiring too, so I accept a pace slower than leg 1 , more like leg 2. Reckon five hours maybe? However, the traffic thins out as I get into the hills north of Montabaur, and the pace picks up. Near Betzdorf I need to take a leak (all that water!) and allow myself a quick roadside coffee. No need for fuel. 3 Minute total! After Olpe I know the road well, the day trippers are mostly gone, and I can really whistle along. Whoops! Approaching cars flashing me, so I slow down in time to avoid the cops' radar trap. Thanks, you anonymous tin-can drivers :) Through the twisties and the hills back from Korbach which I know so well I can really get flying. Leg three takes only 3 hours fiftyone minutes after all. 329 km and an 85,8 km/h rolling average. 20.5 liters means a consumption of 6.2 l/h on leg three. Get the timestamped fuel receipt (18:52) and photograph the bike at the Henglarn village signpost.

Summary : So 385+355+329=1069 by my reckoning. The odometer says 1091. Should be on the safe side though, it's unlikely to go 10% fast. Departure 05:10, arrival 18:53 makes 13:43 for 1069 calculated kms makes 78 km/h average including all stops. Rolling average 82,5 km/h. Pretty good for country roads and a guy approaching 60 himself :) I'm tired but happy. Bike ran like clockwork; thanks Yamaha.

Take a relaxing bath. I'll clean the bike and submit the paperwork tomorrow. End of a really good day out :) Aching muscles the next morning though!

Megameter confirmed : That was the day's log. And why am I only blogging it now? Well the confirmation arrived yesterday, crediting only 1031 km (so my odometer goes 6% fast and my map program goes 3% faster than theirs. But I made it. Next target is an Iron Butt Saddlesore award, 1000 miles in 24 hours (or maybe the BunBurner Gold, 1500 miles in 24 hours), but autobahn is permitted, should be a piece of cake getting around ;-)

MAIL DOWN :( Just opened my Email box. Over 600 in the queue instead of the usual daily 30. So my mail is down due to a DDOSA (Distributed Denial of Service Attack) by SoBig.F ! I'll get my provider to just throw everything away, there's no way I'm going to plow through 600+ mails to find maybe 5 real (non-infected, non-spam) ones. So I'm incommunicado Email-wise until further notice.

posted by Stu Savory on 10th September 2003 at 06:14 Central European Time ;)

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Proxy Germanica

Field Trips on request: Yesterday I suggested to fellow Scot and blogger Gary Turner that he might do field trips on request for fellow bloggers and put his new telephone-cum-camera to good use. I suggested he visit Bletchley Park (BP), the WW2 code-breaking centre near where he lives. Why BP? Well I'm a crypto freak, as you can see from my crypto pages (in German). He generalised that idea to one of living in England by Proxy. I could do living in Germany by Proxy field trip requests too if they are reasonable. I already do various proxy stuff for friends with similar hobbies, not just crypto. E.g. I run a local German help scheme for any members of the 59 club (a famous UK motorcyle club) who may be passing through.

Maybe this kind of thing would please Meg too, who summarises me in her blog-link-quilt thus :- "Stu Savory. Lives in Germany and blogs only about other countries...a view of the news from Stu's part of the world. No info about Germany or German politics. Darn. We wanted to know about Germany!". As an aside for Meg and her blog-link-quilt, did you know that there are only 17 significantly different ways to tesselate a plane? Meg used rectangles of course, because that is all that HTML supports. It turns out that Persian decorators knew all 17 even in the middle ages. There are Moschees bearing all 17 patterns in Iran and Iraq (unless Dubya has senselessly destroyed them).

First year Math students may send me their proofs that there are only 17 ways to tesselate the plane and, if any is shorter than mine, I'll publish it here, OK?

Ooops, on rereading this before posting it, I just realised that those of you running smut-filter software may have a problem with the last two parts of my tripartite word construction above telephone-cum-camera . Well tough luck, that's what you get for limiting free speech, you miss out on some of the fun in life :)

posted by Stu Savory on 9th September 2003 at 06:41 Central European Time ;)

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High School / College restart

Some useful tips : High School restarts (in some regions of Germany) today. So I thought I'd give some useful local tips which may also apply to those attending High School or College for the first time in the US of A, Canada, Oz, etc.

• Learn to identify the teachers. They are the extremely hirsute creatures with huge floppy jowls and heavy tufts of long black hair coming out of the nose. And that's just the female ones!
• Teachers are not all stereotype stern-faced and joyless creatures. Some teachers may just steal your girl. Especially the female ones mentioned above! So it's best you keep your hands on her at all times.
• Remove all rings from eyebrows, ears, nipples, nose, belly, and labia or scrotum. Such jewelry is highly attractive to conservative teachers, who may just tear it out to get in possession thereof. Ouch, very Ouch.
• Teachers often administer spelling tests based on current news items, so learn how to spell gubernatorial. You and the other Gubers, Arnie, OK?
• If you spent the vacation watching TV repeats and therefrom "learning" the notorious Bruce Lee death dropkick, be warned that it is seriously over-rated. The other studs may have watched the films too, and learned the defence moves. So just blow your bubblegum to show how incredibly clever you are.
• Watch out when the religious teacher from the One True Church (doesn't matter which one) wants to give you a hands-on religious experience.
• If all else fails, learn something. Anything. Rest assured, it will be of help some day. Otherwise you could end up on Jay Leno's Tonight Show.

posted by Stu Savory on 8th September 2003 at 06:21 Central European Time ;)

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It's a Wierd, Wierd, World.

Spot the Puppet : Puppets being (mis)used for propaganda purposes? screams the headline. Now we have to worry whether Bush is Elmo's secret weapon? Or was that the other way around? Now Sesame Street is being used to brainwash furry-nerds, where Bush's bullying and dog-wagging did not succeed.

Just yesterday, new figures show that, since President Bush took office, the US economy has lost 3.3 million jobs. No president since Herbert Hoover has seen job losses like this over the course of his term in office. Finally, more people in the US now disapprove of Bush than approve of him. Way to go, folks!

Where are they now? : If you are just a regular thief, then sure, times are getting hard for you. But if you are a really stupid thief, then they are even harder. This week there was a hilarious story about a man who stole a GPS tracking device that was actively transmitting. Duh!

Dead on track? : And this week, the british bobby (=cop) was as diligent as ever. Go read the story about a Vicarious Biker ( aka bikarious vicar) who was pulled over for driving a hearse, topless.

Blogging helps : Blogging is cartharsis, especially for those who suffer from Mickeyschrott Windoze. I recommend they go read Charles Eicher's 5th September blog entry. But generally it is true, a study shows , that blogging reduces our stress levels (cartharsis) and keeps us healthy too. Blog On, folks!

posted by Stu Savory on 7th September 2003 at 11:41 Central European Time ;)

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Education Woes.

Spelling : I suppose if you ride Milwaukee Iron, you don't have to be able to spell too. I hate to imagine what would happen if you wore this jacket in a Hell's Angels' dive! But maybe noone would notice. After all, Dubya is dyslexic too, we're told. Perhaps that's why he has reports read to him, so-called 'White House Briefings'. Bill Clinton liked Oval Office Briefs too, remember ;-)

And sometime between now and October 8, even Volks-hero Arnhie has a really difficult task. No, not competing with pawn-star Mary Carey. Nor with pawn-magnate Larry Flynt (sp?). No! But he is going to have to pronounce the word gubernatorial. Take cover when he does, you folks in Calipawnia.

UK TV Quiz Show :
Quizmaster : What is the capital of Italy?
Contestant : France.
Quizmaster : France is another country. Try again.
Contestant : Oh, um, Benidorm.
Quizmaster : Wrong, sorry, let’s try another question. In which country is the Parthenon?
Same contestant : Sorry, I don’t know.
Quizmaster : Just guess a country then.
Contestant : Paris.

Postscript : Arnhie got hit by a flying egg yesterday. O tempera, oxymoron!

posted by Stu Savory on 5th September 2003 at 06:13 Central European Time ;)

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Canada 1, United States 0.

Canada 1 : The Canadian Government has signed an agreement with an indigenous group of native indians granting them territory nearly the size of Switzerland.

The deal, which was signed by Prime Minister Jean Chretien and leaders of the Tlicho Nation group, creates the largest single block of land owned by the Tlichos.

United States 0 :
American Indians are embroiled in a $137bn lawsuit with the US Government over land royalties. The lawsuit centres on huge tracts of land west of the Mississippi. The Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA), an arm of the US Department of the Interior, is being sued in a class action on behalf of 280,000 American Indians.

The plaintiff, Eloise Cobell, a 56-year-old Blackfeet Indian from Browning, Montana, claims billions went missing because trusts were pilfered by the US Government.

The dispute dates back to the 1887 Dawes Act, which seized Indian land - much of it rich in natural resources - and gave it to white-owned companies to exploit.

I quote here Congressman Henry Dawes, Author of Dawes Act 1887 :
To be civilised is to ...wear civilised clothes, cultivate the ground, live in houses, send children to school, ride in Studebaker wagons, drink whiskey and own property.

posted by Stu Savory on 3rd September 2003 at 06:14 Central European Time ;)

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Good Paper, Bad Paper, No Paper

Good Paper : It being the start of a new month, I decided to make my first Blog entry one with a positive note (E sharp?). As chance would have it, I was just listening to a favourite old Pink Floyd album called Animals, which has a great track entitled "Pigs on the Wing".

If you didn't care what happened to me
And I didn't care for you
We would zig-zag our way through the boredom and pain
Occasionally glancing up through the rain
Wondering which of the buggers to blame
And watching for pigs on the wing

Could I find anything better? If pigs could fly! So I Googled around for phrases like that and found a japanese site, luckily with a UK subsidiary, called Flying Pig.

There is also a US subsidiary.

They sell modern day Origami and automata made out of paper. The picture on the left shows their Flying Pig. They have quite a large assortment of fascinating products and mechanisms made of paper. Go buy some for your children, or grandchildren, godchildren etc., or yourselves :-)

Bad Paper :
The Pentagon found an attractive a way of identifying the Iraqi leadership that it still continues to hunt down. The 55-card "Deck of Death" quickly became a "must-have" item in the civilian US too, generating good profits for card-making companies. There were lots of others (Politicians etc) who brought out similar ideas for their own (electoral?) purposes. Most people probably will dismiss them. But one deck, "America's Most Unwanted," is different -- it's dangerous. It uses public domain photos of its antiwar targets, usually photos depicting politicians, Hollywood stars, or media types at their worst. The difference is that the "Unwanted" deck is the creation of two active-duty Marine officers, and what's dangerous is that the Marine Corps is approving of their sale and distribution. I.e. the military is actively engaging in mud-slinging at pacifists, instead of maintaining their politically neutral role.

The Boston Globe has a good article about this dangerous tendency.

No Paper :
Today (Monday) we attempted to have a paperless day. I had been shocked that, when the garbage truck came last week, we had a 120 liter garbage can just full of paper. Told the paper-boy not to deliver today, watching the news on TV instead. Did miss doing the crossword-puzzle though. Took a basket to the bakery shop, so didn't need a paper bag from them. At work, I could organise meetings etc. electronically, send Emails instead of faxes. Take notes on the laptop. Order stuff via the Internet. Distribute documents using Adobe's PDF format. A Google for other people's experiences turned up a 2001 report by Curtis University, Australia. Read section 4.

Amusingly, I found their report - by their Process Improvement Group - because the group's abbreviation was PIG :-)

posted by Stu Savory on 1st September 2003 at 22:14 Central European Time ;)

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