15.10.08
Software Woes
8.10.08
Where?
That was at 13:35 local time. It's 15:39 now.
DW
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device
7.10.08
Google Maps
I just installed Google Maps on my mobile and, being a bit like that, I was excited to find that the little flashing blue dot on a point of the map EXACTLY where I am in the world, is spot on!
In the same way, I was excited t night to learn that by formatting a cell in an Excel spreadsheet like this,
#0 “This will be in the cell too”
you will see 20 This will be in the cell too if you just enter the number 20 in that cell.
DW
The Banana Leaf Apolo Singapore
Another winning meal in Singapore. I have just eaten an excellent curry at the Banana Leaf Apolo in Little India. Old fashioned in lots of respects, busy, big kitchen and loads of choice even for a veggie like me.
I have some veggie samosas to start with then black dal, paneer in a spinach sauce and steamed rice. Really good quality and brilliant value for money.
In addition to telling you about the restaurant, I want you to know about an award they have won. Take a look at this page to see the certificate you will find at the front of their menu: http://www.thebananaleafapolo.com/award.htm Don’t you just love it? Not only have they won the award but who else would have thought of serving 1,101 fish head curry dishes at one sitting? Isn’t it handy they had 1,101 fish heads lying around?!!
More than that, the fish heads in question are BIG: they’re not gold fish or sprats, they are big fish heads!
Little India is all dressed up for the Festival of Lights, Deepavali, too; and here is some proof of that, taken just before I got to the restaurant.
Uniquely Singapore as they say!
DW
6.10.08
Chinese Restaurants in Singapore
After many indifferent quality vegetarian meals in a variety of restaurants in the UK, it is a real pleasure to be here in Singapore to taste some excellent quality restaurant vegetarian food.
In the last 24 hours I have been to two Chinese restaurants here and whilst they were in different locations, they were both top quality. They were not expensive either: I ate lone at the first one and paid the equivalent of around GBP10 whereas tonight I ate with a friend and we spent the princely sum of around GBP20 for the two of us.
Good quality, tasty, well served and in nice surroundings. Not your chipboard, plastic fork and spoon jobs either.
DW
New Computer … Gates will get on your nerves
I am not alone but I am constantly astonished at the ineptitude of the Microsoft set of offerings.
My HP laptop has severely let me down for the the THIRD time in its short 10 month history. HP customer service is shockingly appallingly bad in the UK too. Given the work that I do, I have had to buy yet another computer: this time I went for a brand I know, Acer; and bought a good spec laptop in Singapore at a low price.
So I found a bit of time just before leaving my hotel in Bangkok to do some setting up work. That’s when I fell foul of Microsoft’s latest:
Outlook started by crashing
Then it wanted me to update some software that has so far taken me over an hour to download.
I also wanted to install Windows Live Writer (this MS offering SEEMS good!). I downloaded and installed from the relevant MS page. Then when I used it I was told that the software had expired and that I should download the latest version. I believed them so I did that. More wasted time. Then I started the software again to be told that it had expired and I should download it again. FFS as my nephew said the other day!!
I am now at the stage where I want to start suing these people for wasting my time and my money.
DW
3.10.08
Peter Mandelson
Gordon Brown is under attack too and this is another front of attack.
You heard it here first.
DW
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device
1.10.08
Coolpis
Kimchee is a tasty and healthy Chinese cabbage salad ... What made them add the coolpis though?
DW
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device
30.9.08
MAN Breakfast
Full English Breakfast and a pint of Lager £9.99 ... astonishing bilge.
DW
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device
29.9.08
Grassington
I kid you not!
DW
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device
28.9.08
Scabchester United
26.9.08
Mortgages as they used to be
I have just come across this and thought it was so good and so simple that I had to share it. Please remember that anyone who is around about 45 years older and more will recognise what you are about to read: this is exactly how it used to be.
“One case in point is Hudson City Bancorp, a 140 year old company based in Paramus, New Jersey that has managed to avoid the mortgage meltdown and continues to post tremendous results. Business journalists have discovered this quiet little outfit and marvelled at its strategic insights. Its shares are up 50% since last August, when the credit crisis really kicked in. "Hudson City banks the old-fashioned way," Newsweek marvelled. "It takes deposits and makes mortgages to people who buy homes in which they plan to live. And then it hangs on to" the mortgages, rather than sell them in the secondary market.
Imagine the brilliance! Take deposits. Make sensible loans. Repeat over and over again, until your market capitalisation approaches $10 billion.” PLEASE NOTE THE IRONY!!
The New York Times tried to unpack the secrets of Hudson's success and offered this analysis: "The bank carefully screened loan applicants to ensure they would be able both to afford a new house and reside there, rather than flip it. And the bank demanded hefty down payments ... as a cushion against any sharp drop in home prices, because it planned to hang on to the loans."
What a formula! Make sure borrowers can afford their loans. Insist that they make a big down payment. Favour owners over speculators. AGAIN NOTE THE IRONY!!”
The real benefit of what this traditional, safe and sensible mortgage provider does is easily seen in the following figures:
“The bank has written 100,000 mortgages worth $26 billion and has a grand total of 15 foreclosures. Not 15%, just 15 mortgages out of 100,000.”
So, here is the model of what we used to do in the pre Thatcher days. So what went wrong? It’s obvious isn’t it?!
DW
24.9.08
Windows Live Writer
I am always one to try something new and to be as up to date as possible in the computing world. I don’t necessarily have the biggest and best hardware but I like my software to be up to date.
I run Office 2007, I have just upgraded Smart Draw to version 2009, I have reinstalled Dreamweaver and yesterday I installed Acrobat Reader version 9. Just a few examples of my software world.
Here’s another example: I have just installed Windows Live Writer (Beta) and this message is coming to you, together with the following photo and table, courtesy of WLW. Let’s see if it’s any good. I am not going to stress the system, just testing as uploading photos to this Blog is a bit of a faff: not difficult but a faff.
I like this photo of some arch ways to be found in the Forbidden City: I call it Cloisters.
WLW also claims to be able to include tables in a posting so let’s try that too:
| Destination | Duration |
| Geneva | 6 days |
| Beijing | 9 days |
There you are and if I can shrink it down enough, I am going to upload a video of yours truly walking around a part of Beijing. The title includes the phrase Hapless Tyke, so that gives you a clue of the flavour of the film.
DW
22.9.08
Wise Words from Henry Ford
A business that makes nothing but money is a poor business.
True!!
DW
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device
21.9.08
Britain's Finest
Please note, proper mushy peas made from dehydrated marrowfat peas and not, never, from a tin!
DW
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device
20.9.08
The Ordinary Rose Speaks
Gee Rosie, teach me your insights. Nothing to do with 20: 20 hindsight then!
Clot!
DW
Sent from my BlackBerry® wireless device
19.9.08
Google's Chrome Browser
I downloaded and started using google’s Chrome web browser because I was sick to death of seeing Internet Explorer using as much as 100 megabytes of memory to bring me what often looked like the simplest of html pages.
At first Chrome used up a lot less memory. Then I noticed yesterday that it was using THREE instances of memory ... don’t know how to say that really. All added up to about 70 – 80 Mb of RAM.
I have just looked again and today Chrome is currently nestling in 105 Mb of RAM plus 25Mb of RAM and 43 Mb of RAM ... worse than IE, I can hardly believe it. They really are all the same these people. What is all that nonsense about Chrome being an new operating system within a browser and being more efficient and the rest of it? Bullspoo that's what!
DW
18.9.08
Random Musings
Well, not so random really as regular readers to this august Blog will recognise the themes in what I am about to write.
Obesity
You might have been watching the Olympics and Paralympics on your television over the last month or so. In many of the programmes you will have seen you can’t help failing to have noticed how slim, indeed petite, many Chinese women and men are. It is a source of major embarrassment to go to somewhere like Beijing, then, to see representatives of your own country barrelling out of their hotel rooms into the streets, restaurants and sights of their host country.
Who is it who has decided that it is becoming more acceptable and therefore normal for people to become and stay obese. Middle aged people become overweight and always have. Some more than others of course; but I am really concerned by this scenario:
As I left Beijing I went to the airport in a mini bus with an English family of father, mother and two children:
- Father around 6 feet tall and obese
- Mother around 5 feet 7 inches tall and obese
- Daughter as tall as her mother and around 22 – 24 years of age and obese
- Son as tall as his mother and around 17 – 18 years old and significantly overweight
These people are unhealthy by dint of being overweight. At the moment they could tell me that they have made the choice to be obese and it is none of my business. Well, in a few years’ time when the father starts to get short of breath and maybe becomes one of the many on incapacity benefits and has to visit the hospital more and more for more and more treatment, then it ceases to be a personal matter and becomes a matter for society. The same with the mother. Even worse for their children as I assume that they have become obese or overweight many years before their parents. Hence the children will become a burden on the State a decade or even more before their parents will.
This is a shocking state of affairs and these people need to be educated out of their Burger bars and their outsize portions in other equally unhealthy restaurants.
The sad news is that it was apparent in Beijing that as China is becoming richer the Chinese are starting to suffer from Western dietary and weight problems. A few children and a few adults are outsize now. I can’t estimate what proportion of Chinese people are obese now but the signs are there. McDonalds is there as is KFC and all of the other monstrous fast food outlets that parade as restaurants.
Authenticity … not
On the plane home from Beijing I sat through the latest Indiana Jones film: like the rest, wham bam; heaps of incredible action; the Russkies are still managing to be the enemy … The film is set in the 40s or 50s, not sure although I think they did tell us the date and they obviously went to great lengths to make the buildings, the clothes and the cars all appropriate for the period. Then they did their usual thing with the language. Whilst the majority of things we say now are the same as the things we said in the 1940s and 1950s, their script writers and editors fail to appreciate that in those days even the Americans didn’t say things like this, in one sentence:
It’s about money, it’s about fame, it’s about archaeology …
If you’re going to go to such lengths to get the setting right, don’t forget the language too.
Pink Floyd
You might have seen that Richard Wright of Pink Floyd has just died: 65 years old and died of cancer. Again on the plane I took the chance to take a look at the Pink Floyd compilation they have on their ICE system (spot the airline!!) and found:
- Arnold Layne
- See Emily Play
- Bike
- Among others
Diana Dors
I think I have ranted about Diana Dors before. Dors was an overweight bleach blonde woman who was famous in the 1950s and 1960s in the UK. I couldn’t understand her fame then and I can’t understand it now. I watched a bit of her on the Tommy Cooper show on the ICE system. She tried to tell a joke: it fell flat. Then she tried to sing a song: she warbled. Tell me the secret and let me become a celebrity like that.
Wow!
I met a quiet and unassuming American on the Great Wall of China! He was in my tour party and we chatted a bit. He is an animator from Hollywood and works on projects for ESPN, Fox, ABC and a few of the other big television stations in the States. We talked about lots of things and he kept saying Wow! At first I thought he thought I was saying interesting and profound things. Then I heard him chatting to other people and he said wow to lots of things they were saying too!
No offence, just his way of speaking I think.
DW
16.9.08
She was Mobbed!
Fran was a bit overwhelmed but copes well with these things.
These medals go in the vault at the bank now along with the others.
DW.
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