International Football Cheats … sorry Ireland!

Not only in England but international now. France have qualified for the World Cup Finals in South Africa as a result of a cheat having handled the ball that allowed France to get the ball in the back of the net and thus beat Ireland to the finals.

Thierry Henri has admitted handling the ball that allowed his colleague to score a goal. It was as clear as it can be to everyone on the pitch and in the video playback. Still, Ireland have been eliminated because Henri cheated and even though it was in his power to tell the referee what he had done when he had done it, he chose to remain silent and cheat his way through to the finals.

It’s really a disgrace now as every game that France plays will be soiled by this one event.

How can you not feel sorry for Ireland who grace these finals whenever they attend?

DW

A380 Model … so classy!

I took this photo in the Emirates lounge at LHR on Friday. Just love this plane. Hoping to go on it again soon!!

DW

Have you got a light Mac?

That tag line is the first part of an old joke … anyone know the second line?

Anyway, young Master W brought along his Mac laptop to our rendezvous the other day and for the first time ever I was able to appreciate what all of these Appl Mac wallahs have been chuntering on about.

How about speed and design? Nothing looks or feels complicated on a Mac. You want to open iTunes on a Mac, you’ll have to wait all of less than a second for it to load AND run. Yes, so long! I just opened iTunes on my Acer Extensa as an experiment and it took 7 seconds to start. On this laptop, HP TouchSmart, it took 33 seconds to load and run: this included having to agree to the terms and conditions AGAIN, the file list being rebuilt AGAIN and being asked if I want iTunes to be my default player AGAIN.

I was shown a video demonstration and could hear nothing so I asked, “When will the screaming cooling fan start to operate as the system becomes overheated?” That didn’t happen. As I type this, the fan on the HP laptop is working overtime even though I am only using this software, Windows Live Writer, gmail is on in the background, Outlook is open and there is a file downloading from the internet. This is a 64 bit machine with a huge disc drive and 3Gb of RAM … and still it struggles to cope.

Ease of use, sleek lines, Steve Jobs probably doesn’t have anywhere near as many people taking his name in vain as that Gates has, reliability …

We then went to the Apple Store in Regent’s Street in London and took a look at a few things, including their new magic mouse. A magic mouse would be wasted on a Windows machine: far too clever and smart, it would be the highlight of your computing day!!

One day when my PCs have all died I’ll buy a Mac!

DW

Mushrooms, Beautiful Mushrooms

I love mushrooms and if ever you find yourself in the Emirates lounge at LHR, see if they still do canneloni with mushroom sauce.

Simply divine dahling!!

DW

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Give him a Break will ya?

I had lunch with someone the other day, let's call him D! A propos some business and a bit of chitter chat, I wrote to D's mother and said this: that and D's body building exploits have given him a 52 inch chest.

Thinking that would generate a bit of pride and so on, I was shocked and somewhat amused at her response:

"... well, good for him but i just wonder whether he spends all of his time in the gym now rather than studying hard ... have you talked  about his studies?"

There was a conversation earlier in the year between me and the mother in question to the effect that these comments are counter productive. I got a promise that she knew and that she would never make them again!!

DW

Fran BA (Hons) and her Papa

Had this photo taken outside the Corn Exchange Theatre, Cambridge yesterday just before Fran was admitted to the degree of BA ...

Who is that suave gentleman with Fran?

DW

Is this the World's Smallest Hotel Room?

The title asks the question!

DW

Sideways Look at an Hotel Room

Just for the record, here is my room in the Al Khafji Beach Hotel.

DW

Dali, my Emirates Heroine

Dali, my Emirates heroine!

I flew from Dubai to Heathrow yesterday and Dali was virtually my personal stewardess for parts of the flight. As I got onto the plane she spotted that I am a frequent flyer (they don't all spot that!) and made my stay a warm and inviting one.

Dali is from Japan, spent five years in New Zealand where she picked up their accent and learned perfect English.

We found that we have pies and Cadbury's chocolate in common. We chatted for a long time at the start, middle and end of the flight and she made me feel wanted.

Isn't that nice?

Well done Dali, my Emirates stewardess of the year!

DW

Backup Solution

That's Backup, not to be confused with Bacup which is a town in Lancashire.

I did lose a lot of data the other week when HP and Microsoft decided that all of my work should be in vain. Recent work, work for up and coming seminars and ALL of the one year's work that I did for Abingdon and Witney College ... gone or not entirely recoverable.

I was playing with the quick start button on my Acer Extensa laptop yesterday and came across a utility which I had not previously seen, in spite of owning the machine for almost exactly one year: acer NTI Shadow.

At the time of writing I have just backed up all of my main working files to a separate disk to the one the originals are on. Let's see what Gates can do now and OF COURSE I will backup to another computer AND another hard drive today/tomorrow.

Trust no one.

DW

Time to Replay the Games

I have just seen yet another blatant dive that turned into a penalty from one of England's supposed premier teams. A Liverpool player, surprisingly not SG, dived heinously badly to have a penalty awarded to them. The conversion of that penalty was taken by SG and it enable Liverpool to draw 2 : 2 against Birmingham City.

These cheats are driving me away from football.

Following simple/complex analysis by the Football League powers that be, points can be deducted, games replayed, wins awarded to the opposing team, players fined ... all of these things should happen because it's a disgrace and an embarrassment now.

DW

Fadge of the Berlin Wall!

No surprise the likes of Sarkozy are trying elbow their way into the celebrations. The PEOPLE of East Germany rose up against their nonsense leaders along with their brothers and sisters across the former Soviet Union. THEY drove their nonsense politicians out of office. THEY bravely faced their police forces and solders. THEY won.

I was sick the other day when I saw former politicians like Gorbachev and Bush Senior with the ailing Kohl being lauded for their contribution to the fall of the Berlin Wall. There was also an apology for the non appearance of the woman Thatcher: too ill to attend ... good.

No doubt history has firmly been rewritten so that these here today gone tomorrow politicians will get most of the credit.

Let's have another fanfare for the common man: it was them wot done it!

DW

Fabulous Sight

There were just two things missing from the equation:

• my good camera
• a clean window

On approach to Dubai International Airport this morning, just before 10 am local time, we came in from the North, over the Gulf and there to meet us was a prize winning photograph of a sight. The taller buildings of Dubai shrouded up to around one third of their average height with mist and the Burj Dubai rising skywards right in the middle. Fabulous!

If only I'd had my good camera with me and if only my window had been clean you'd all be swooning at the sight now.

DW

Next in Sequence

What is the missing number in this sequence:

1. 2. ? 32

DW


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Breakfast with Tom Jones

You know Tom Jones, the old Welsh warbler of course. Well, who woulld have thought you'd find him here on the Gulf singing Deliliah and several other hits. Let alone be with me for breakfast.

OK, not in person. But given the complete lack of anyone from anywhere near Europe let alone Wales, apart from me, I was surprised at the choice of today's music. Better than the rap music they played the other day though!!

DW

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Al Khafji, Saudi Arabia … video of the year?

Hello everyone, I am currently in Al Khafji on the Gulf for a few days and this video shows the beach just outside my hotel room. It’s a beachside paradise without people. Lovely view and gorgeous weather.

Enjoy this snippet!

DW

Cookery Programme Slop

I was desperate so I watched the Local Hero Cookery programme on BBC Lifestyle this morning and here are some of the things they said.

someone was passionate ... they said this about 8 million times

look at that ... eg look at that [piece of meat] ... when one looked there was nothing unusual to see, in my opinion

wow! ... said by the interviewer when a cook taking part in a cookery programme in which locally sourced ingredients was vital said that he was using local ingredients in his restaurant

a dish had 'Lavender going through it' What? WHAT?

Someone who said that even though he's a television chef (I'd never seen him before so I took his word for that) 'It's not just about cooking ...' We know!!

'He's so on my wavelength'

amazing is slipping down the list as it was mentioned only about one million times

Finally, not the best or the worst but the last one I noticed: reshtaurant!

I will renew my offer to the BBC to teach its presenters how to COMMUNICATE.

DW

Cheat, cheat, cheat ...

It's Saturday, it's Chelsea, it's a penalty ... the Chelsea centre forward ran into the penalty area along with a defender, slight contact possibly but then we see the arched back and the collapsing in a heap. It's bad enough that Chelsea were awarded an unfair penalty but the defender was sent off. Not good that.

In the same way, Kenwyne Jones was sent off in the Sunderland match as a result of an opposing player collapsing in a heap after a push by Jones. However, the opposing player collapsed while holding his face as if he had been punched by Jones. The replay shows nothing of the kind: Jones did NOT punch anyone. Not good that.

DW

Burnley 2 v Hull City 0

While Burnley were winning the game against Hull City at Turf Moor the BBC web site was persistently showing that the match was being drawn 1 : 1. Even when they put up the full time score it still said 1 : 1 draw. Just checked their videprinter and it shows a 2 : 0 win for the Clarets. Get in!

Then again, as Fulham were winning 3 : 1 over Liverpool, the BBC site was showing a 2 : 1 lead for Liverpool.

DW

Still Hounded by HP

Let me be optimistic and say that the new Touchsmart tablet pc I got from HP recently is working well.

Today we bought four new HP printers and I set out to install one for myself. On my HP tablet all is well. As for the Acer Extensa laptop, pshaw! Not only would the printer not behave itself but when i uninstalled the software that came with the thing and then carried out a system restore, I found I had lost a LOT of vital data. For some reason, the files I have lost are, by and large, those that I had not backed up on other computers/hard disks.

It’s weird and driving me wild.

I am trying another route to sanity.

DW

Yet Another Cheating Premiership Player ... well, one of the Usual Suspects

I am working and keeping an eye on the Chelsea v Blackburn Rovers match on the telly.

I heard a call for a penalty and turned to the screen to see Didier Drogba in close up. Immediately I said to myself, he just dived. The replay shows the archetypical arched back collapse in a heap cheating dive that is the hallmark of English football these days. He dived.

The sad thing is that Chelsea were leading 3 : 0 at the time. There is just no need for cheating at that level of the game.

DW

What?

I have just prepared and published two posts here but clearly there is something wrong with Blogger at the moment as I cannot access this blog: I can access Duncan's Diacritical Discussion, my other Blogger based Blog.

This is what I saw when I opened this Blog ... no use to me at all so I have written to Blogger asking them why they assume I can use the language local to where I am simply because I am where I am. Clots!

DW

Do Tectonic Plates SLAM into each other?

I read a report this morning about an earthquake: not the BBC but a site whose name has already gone. Well, they said that earthquakes in the region under discussion have come as a result of one tectonic plate slamming into another one several million years ago.

Now really, can something moving at maybe one centimetre or even one metre a year really be said to have slammed into something?

DW

You're Having a Laugh Mr Gates!

I have fallen for this one AGAIN! I like the idea of booting up a computer and then, rather than cold booting after a break or at the start of a new day, warm booting via the snooze/hibernate button.

Well, it's a right laugh. You might be able to do that once. No, let me be kind and say twice. Then you will find that after it has been warm booted three times it cannot cope: addins stop working, even MS's own programmes stop responding and we get the blue spinning wheel of death for up to five minutes at a time, access to some apparently running programs freezes.

So, you have to restart the computer.

This comes 24 hours after the launch of Windows 7 and although I will buy Windows 7 and I have read and heard A LOT of marketing guff about the new system, I am not that confident that it will give me the kind of experience that I know the average Apple Mac user is experiencing. Don't know about Linux and other OS users but I'll bet there is a lot less frustration with other established OS than there is with most flavours of Windows.

Windows XP seemed good by comparison with what went before: I saw the BSOD very rarely, things seemed more reliable. Of course boot times are slow and they get slower and slower very quickly as you load and use your computer more and more. Against the grain, Vista impressed me by the way it did things in a better way and more efficiently too: even error reporting and recovery seemed more impressive than before. Now, this Vista driven laptop is coming up to one year old and a 5 minute cold boot is fast for it: I even gave the thing an 840Mb boost by letting Windows use a 1Gb micro drive to speed up my system. Pah! (See my post, Gatesed Again!) The blue spinning wheel of death is a more frequent visitor now.

These Windows people often promise that the launch of a new version of their products is a new build, relying on nothing from before: I think they have given the lie to that now. Moreover, things like menus that are used throughout MS products are not consistent: they can look and behave differently even within Office products let alone between Office and Window and so on.

What really irritates me is that I know from my work that even now only 25% or so of the Office population has upgraded from Office 2003 to 2007. I also know from my web stats that 90% or so of my visitors are using a Windows platform to do so.

Gates and his colleagues took the microcomputer world by storm and by aggression throughout the 80s and 90s and we are now suffering from the monopoly they have created. I wonder what will happen, what will MS do, if Windows 7 flops like Vista did and like Office 2007 did?

We need a knight in shining armour. Along those lines, take a look at the Apple iMac just announced: stunning if everything they say is true. Then look at the new mouse that comes with the system: it's called a Magic Mouse. This magic mouse seems to me to be the new iPod/iTouch: the free thinking development that makes anyone wearing a baseball cap say, Wow! Amazing! It IS an astonishing mouse that Gates and his team could never come up with. Start here and no, I am not working for Apple or anyone connected with them ... http://store.apple.com/uk/browse/home/shop_mac/family/imac?cid=&cp=2712&sr=em

I have mentioned before that apart from Windows Live Writer, which is just one tiny application really, there is nothing about MS products that make me think that's amazing; and I mean amazing in its true an literal sense, not in the sense that is used by people of limited vocabulary who infest our screens and newspapers now.

Rant over!

DW

Gatesed AGAIN!

Why did I want to believe that Microsoft would keep a promise?

As with many people I accumulate odds and ends and one of these is a 1Gb micro memory card that I used to have in a phone until I bought an 8Gb card to replace it. I then put and kept that 1Gb card in this laptop to use it as and when necessary. Every time I switched the computer on I got a message announcing that it had found something new ... offering to let me look at the files on there or offering to use the card to help to speed up my system.

I fell for it and said, OK use the card to speed up my system. Windows told me it wanted at least 840 Mb of the 1,000 Mb on the card. Initially I thought that's just stupid because I can only use the remaining 160 Mb on the card for files and so forth. Anyway, I gave it a go and watched as the computer booted for the first time under this new and speedier regime.

Did I say speedier? I meant, under this new and completely unchanged regime. NO discernible change in performance at all that I can see. Maybe there are some hidden things happening that Microsoft is really proud of. As for me, I just feel more anti Gates frustration. I still keep wondering how the world fell for this chump so hard and for so long. Moreover, where is the competition to break the cycle of Microsoft domination to get rid of all of this Microsoft nonsense?

DW

Oxbridge and the Aristocracy

You may not have noticed the changes taking place in broadcasting and the media.

For centuries the aristocracy and Oxbridge graduates have dominated or les Fleet Street and then the BBC. You might not know that many comedians, cooks, actors and warblers are from the aristocracy and Oxbridge. Not just the obvious ones like the Monty Python team and the Goodies either. A LOT more than that.

DW


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Look at that and more!

In addition to amazing and passion and basically I am adding 'look at that' to my list of words and phrases to be banned from the language when the revolution comes.

'Look at that' is uttered by just about everyone on the telly who even so much as lifts a pan or a skillet let alone prepares something reasonable.

The extreme case was when the least good of the Hairy Bikers said 'look at that' when he had put some uncooked rice grains in a pan with some butter. I thought, look at WHAT?

I should add that any programme that remotely hints at DIY or building face lifts stays unwatched as I cannot bear to see EVERYONE at the end of such programmes as they open their eyes and say, 100% guarantee of this, 'Oh my God!' I find that so unnecessary and offensive.

Just been reminded of yet another one: national treasure. Grossly over used and mis applied. There are very few national treasures as it is a highly reserved concept. Thora Hird is the last one I can think of. What these media types do is to confuse frequency with treasure trove. Simply seeing someone like Stephen Fry everywhere ALL of the time does not, NOT, make him a treasure.

DW


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