Priceless Paintings from W7

W7 is on the other side of the big pond again, watching Barak Obama’s inauguration on the day and right there. I expect a different America right away, and shall watch out for it. Oh, and I will be doing some paid work from my office in San Jose, California, too, so as per usualr rule, this blog will not get updated while I am out there.

Enjoy the lovely pictures, take care of yourself and be back at the end of the month, when regular blogging will recommence.

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Thoughts california, ooto

Reaching the end of a week is always a good thing, but this week in particular ended much better than it started, so I am mighty pleased with it.

Highlights include:

· Good progress with some long-standing difficult (technical) problems at work. Work can be such a pain!

· A letter from the taxman, tentatively approving my tax declaration, hurray! I was almost certain that they wouldn’t quite agree with my calculations, but they did, to the penny. Maybe they gave up understanding my multi-page argument half way through, or maybe it wasn’t too far off the mark. In any case, I am pleased with the outcome, as it means not being hit by some unexpected additional payment.

· Started reading Mark Twain again (The Bible according to Mark Twain, and his Speeches). What a joy! Must find more time for more reading.

P.S. Fascinating to see how Zemanta struggles with this post. Easy to understand since there is no single distinct subject, but I find it fascinating to see how their engine also becomes unsure of itself. All it can do is cling to Mark Twain. Excellent!

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People in Britain complain, as it emerges that collections of domestic recyclables are currently stockpiled. Prices are down, so companies fill warehouses with recycling paper, plastic, metal and glass rather than selling at a loss.

The complain roots from a sense of being cheated. We do all this separating and recycling, one interviewee said in a tear-stricken voice, and all they do is stockpile it.

Makes sense to me. Doesn’t make sense to moan and complain, not in the way portrayed by the BBC. After all, it’s still better than throwing everything onto the landfill, isn’t it?

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Thoughts BBC, Britain, recycling

…very nice food designed for the cold season:

Pork fillets on courgettes, with feta cheese and toasted pine kernels, rice, and Orange Creme Brullee for puddings.

Tagliatelle with a creamy sauce from egg yolks, cream, smoked salmon and cavolo nero.

A vegetable and lentils hot broth.

Goats cheese tarlets (for a taste of summer), followed by a lack of lamb or two, over a bed of roasted vegetables (fennel, squash, turnips, and others), with rice, and with more Orange Creme Brullee.

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Food and Drink cooking, food, recipe

“Bring Out The Best,” Hellmann’s writes on the label of their Real Mayonnaise. “Real mayonnaise.” I am intrigued, and check the list of ingredients:

Vegetable Oil 77%
Pasteurised Egg and Egg Yolk 8%

(also water, vinegar, sugar, lemon juice, mustard flavouring, antioxidant, paprika extract).

No wonder Hellmann’s Real Mayonnaise doesn’t look, smell or taste anything like real mayonnaise. 77 : 8% oil to “egg produce” ratio, and the remaining 15% topped up mostly with water, I assume – no surprise.

I have never measured the oil to egg ratio, but I guess it will be less than 2 parts oil to one part fresh free range egg yolks (in volume) for the real thing, plus lime juice, mustard, salt, a lot of whisking, and nothing else.

I can feel a meal of Calamari with really real garlic mayonnaise and mixed leaf salad coming up real soon.

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Many people in Britain are concerned because the government will ask them, eventually and in all probability, to carry an identity card. Basically, the police will be able to stop you, ask for your Id card, and thus know who you are.

While the privacy concern about Id cards goes a bit further than that, I am baffled about the almost total lack of public discussion and concern about the many privacy issues related to email. I think much of the world is in a state of blissful ignorance in this regard. Did you know the UK governments plans to make your Internet Service Provider (ISP) to keep record of all your emails for a year, starting in March this year? Probably all under the popular anti-terrorism umbrella-excuse. It won’t work, not if you do as I say anyway, but that’s almost beside the point.

A long post today, but it is in the public interest. Really. Especially if you read this thinking Oh techno babble I won’t understand this. You must try.  It’s important. Here’s what most people should know, or decide to ignore, about email privacy:

Most private individuals use a ‘free’ email service such as Hotmail, Googlemail, Live Mail, or one of many others. There is no free lunch. These providers may scan emails, at least for the purpose of targeted advertising, and they may include little pictures at the end of a message, which allow tracking down the recipient to the exact PC where the message is being read.

Most people send and receive emails using insecure connections. Meaning, anyone between you and your email server could read your emails, and potentially scan them.

Almost everyone sends email messages without a digital signature. I should know, because my signed email messages cause confusion with some recipients. Only a message with a valid digital signature it guaranteed to originate where it claims to come from. People selling junk in my name won’t have my digital signature.

Almost nobody sends anything without an envelope in good old snail mail, but almost every email message gets exchanged unencrypted. This is the equivalent of discussing personal or business matters on a postcard. The difference is that the email message can be electronically read by many more machines than just your postman checking Autie’s holiday greetings from Florida.

I don’t mean to be a scaremonger. Most email providers don’t do the evil thing, but the point is that they could, and that –apparently- the government can introduce ever bigger Big Brothers without many people even noticing.

So, for privacy’s and sanity’s sake, please:

• Check if you can use secure connections when reading and writing emails.
• Prefer a real email account, such as the one provided by your ISP or by many independent providers, over a ‘free’ service.
• Consider using a digital signature to sign your messages. Even free SSL certificates are better than nothing.
• Think about what you send by email. Financial details, personal details or business details have no place in unencrypted emails.

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Thoughts, Web/Tech big brother, Britain, email, privacy, signatures

I am sure we have all recently practised the wrapping and unwrapping or presents, but did you also notice the unfolding and folding of professional packaging?

When I unpacked a present of six brandy glasses from their manufacturer’s cardboard box, I had to marvel at this astonishing piece of engineering. A multi-layer and multi-folded cardboard box, which came apart and flat (ready for the recycling bin) after some fiddling without any glue, clips or tape at all.

I have no idea how to engineer those industrial Origami wonders, but some are so brilliant, they make unpacking almost more fascinating than the unwrapping.

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Outside the English spoken countries, technological development over the last four decades created linguistic havoc by forcing all those high-tech terms into the languages, or by forcing the invention of artificial words just to avoid that linguistic wash-out effect.

France is the popular example for trying to avoid such dilution by defining French words, such as le ordinateur for the computer, and some such. I don’t know for sure, but suspect that the Institute Francaise’s efforts were doomed.

Over in Germany, modern German is a terrible mix. I don’t know how this could have been avoided or better solved; inventing artificial terms isn’t likely to succeed in modern times.

Ich habe die Datei gedownloaded is outright painful. Jetzt saven und closen wir is funny, but both examples make me wonder if modern languages might be on the brink of extinction.

Surely, the Germans name Goethe, Schiller and Heinrich Böll, Günther Grass and Ludwig Thoma, and many other names and work to proof a unique and respectable culture in its own language. Nobody would dispute this, but I can’t wait to see what happens if another hundred years of English-language dominance in technological advances have passed.

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Thoughts English, German, Modern Language

You know what I ate over the last ten days already. Scroll down if you don’t. Outside, it is sunny but pretty cold, just the perfect time to think about what I will be eating over the next couple of days.

Warm, heat-and-soul warming food:

Maybe a slowly braised leg of lamb with winter vegetables and potato mash.

Smoked haddock on a bed of lentils.

Speaking of lentils – a delicious and very savoury lentil hotpot is overdue.

Paella. Always good.

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I was looking into ways of making sense of this. The buzzword is the semantic web, or web 3.0, but actually, this doesn’t stop at the web. The goal is to throw a piece of text, such as this article or any other textual information, written in a human language, at a machine.

The machine would then think about it, and reply with information that describes what the input text is all about.

This semantic analysis leads to better categorising, and better retrieval, of information. The next generation Google, if you want.

I was looking into OpenCalais first. They provide the first tier of such an analysis, extracting keywords such as Paris or England from a text, telling me one is a city and the other a country. That’s pretty nifty for a machine.

I even wrote a Windows Live Writer plug-in that tries to make sense of OpenCalais’ output, but I wasn’t really getting where I wanted to be. Well, not within an 8 hour effort anyway.

Then I found Zemanta, and I am in love.

While I am writing this article (in Windows Live Writer), the Zemanta plug-in automatically supplies clever links to enrich my text. All the links in this text are automatically generated by Zemanta; some explain keywords through Wikipedia, others go to Google Maps, or product or company home pages.

Zemanta also suggests images (none used here), keywords (tags), and provides a list of suggested external links, leading to other articles elsewhere on the web, concerned with the same issues.

Isn’t that totally super hyper übercool?

It is.

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Whenever someone talks about the Bronze Age somewhere, I cannot but marvel about my own misconception. I think that I am not alone in this: While there can’t be doubt over some of the accomplishments in metallurgy and culture in general, it also seems certain that folk lived a fairly primitive live back in the Bronze Age. It’s simply a very long time ago.

Or is it?

I must remind myself just how recent this actually is: the Bronze Age happened in Europe between 2300 and 600 years B.C.

No wonder mankind hasn’t really progressed much since, given that it took 250 million years or so to evolve since the dinosaurs, let alone the way from a microbe to a dinosaur, or from nothing to a microbe. The universe has a calculated age of 13.73 ± 0.12 billion years. That’s a long time longer than those short four thousand years since the Bronze Age.

By these standards, things will get interesting again in approximately 10 million years at the earliest. Wake me when we are there.

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Thoughts bronze age

It’s been a new year last year, but God! it’s an old year now …and this is how we saw it off:

Serrano ham, Sicilian cracked olives, melon and deviled eggs for starters.

For the main course, I made a roast beef (high rib), boiled beef (top side), and roast pork (shoulder) with sauce béarnaise and horseradish sauce. A quiche from smoked salmon and dill. Fresh spelt bread and roast potatoes. More endive salad.

For puddings, creme brullee and tipsy tartlets, and a gorgeous lemon cheesecake (the cake was brought by one of the guests).

Looking at the leftovers right now, I can confirm that our 2009 has a good start. I hope so does yours.

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Food and Drink, Thoughts New Year's Day;

I wish you all the best for a healthy and happy new year. That’s all you need. Health and happiness.

Oh, maybe also wealth, so it’ll better be a healthy, wealthy and happy new year.

Oh, and peace, of course. I wish you all the best for a healthy, wealthy, happy and peaceful new year.

But wait, how about friendship, love, patience, understanding, tolerance and wisdom? 

You know what? I just wish you everything.
There. You. Have. It: Everything.

Thoughts New Year's Day;