One thing I forgot to mention, just in case it affects anyone: I won't be able to answer my NZ cellphone or pick up messages on it until I get back here on the 31^st.

posted @ 5:20 PM -

Te Papa (from across the harbour), Wellington, New Zealand



January 10^th 2003

posted @ 5:19 PM -

Signs of the times

1. While I wait for a plane in a small provincial airport (Wellington may be the capital, but Auckland is the only big city in NZ, and this airport is about as busy as Shoreham) I can spend my time online. It may be a bit slow and overpriced, but internet access is readily available.
2. One of the papers (a weekly ex-pats' edition of a UK tabloid, I can't remember which one) had a story about London getting heavy snow, and was trying to make the point that it's the first time many children have seen snow like this in their own country. Not that long ago the qualification wouldn't have been needed, but travel's become so cheap these days....

Some people are still surprisingly primitive though. In booking hotels for the US (the country with the highest internet useage in the world), nowhere I can afford has had online booking (fair enough in itself), or been willing to do everything through email. One place insisted on faxing directions through, even though that involves them making an international call and me having hassle receiving them somewhere, and another has simply used their email to give me a 1-800 number to call. Great, except that you can't call a 1-800 from outside the US....

posted @ 5:18 PM -

Danger! Will Robinson! Dust bunnies!

Twice in a week I've found myself reading about automated vacuum cleaners. Once on Andrea's page, because she decided to mock the publicity material for the Trilobyte (quite rightly too - it was asking for it), and then today because I did a 'where is he now?' search on an academic, only to find that his company is pushing the Roomba.

I suppose to a lot of people this must sound somewhat bathetic after all the hyperbole that gets aired, not only in science fiction, but also by some of the less scrupulous members of the real AI research community about cyborgs taking over the earth and all, but this really is the way AI is going to get into all our homes. Not necessarily vacuum cleaners, but through increasing numbers of mundane applications. Quite apart from the fact that we now have the technology to do things like this, as opposed to being far, far away from creating anything recognisable as humanoid intelligence, there's just far more point to these applications. We already have a perfectly well established mechanism for creating new humanoid intelligences (and if the Raelians turn out to be for real then we have another now), and there's just no need to imitate what we already have. What we need are simpler machines to take individual drudgerous (is that a word?) tasks off the hands of people, who can then be free to do more interesting things with their lives.

As I find myself explaining to people, again and again, Artificial Intelligence is an extremely arrogant name for our little field. It's just a lot more catchy than making machines do cleverer things than last year, with less human intervention....

posted @ 10:07 PM -

Freedom is Slavery

Information Minister Khalil Yaacob says he understands that without jokes and impromptu banter, live programmes become cold and stiff.

However he wants such spontaneity regulated.

Remarkable how he doesn't notice a contradiction between those two sentiments, eh?

BBC News: Malaysia to vet live radio shows

posted @ 6:42 PM -

Talk nicely to your machine

Do you ever find yourself swearing at your computer? Shouting in aggravation when it just doesn't seem to co-operate? Fighting the temptation to put a brick through the monitor?

You're not the only one, but when a man in Boulder, Colorado started waving a gun at his machine and threatening to kill that bitch, a SWAT team was called in.

So just remember, children: pointing a gun at your computer causes all kinds of trouble.

Link courtesy of Blather.

posted @ 6:40 PM -

A long way to travel

Tomorrow I will leave New Zealand for a couple of weeks, and go to the USA to talk to a potential PhD supervisor. I must admit I'm very nervous - it's like an interview, only worse, because I've taken the initiative so I have to go and present myself to him - but I'm also looking forward to it in a way. It doesn't take me very long to miss the academic environment, plus in the best case scenario (which for various reasons is unlikely) I will leave knowing exactly where I'll be for the next 5 - 6 years, which would be nice if it did turn out that way.

Anyway, I don't fly directly there - I'll be going to New York first, where my cousin lives, and my parents will meet me there. I'll be travelling for about 24 hours, and I'm trying to get my head around the effect of the international date line, which I have never crossed before. I think it goes something like this:

I will leave Wellington at lunchtime tomorrow, and transfer in Auckland tomorrow afternoon, sensibly enough. I'll then fly to Papeete (Tahiti), arriving this evening (Thursday). After transferring there I fly overnight to LA, and then I have a day flight to NYC, finally arriving only a few hours after I left, but having spent far too long inside aircraft along the way.

On the other hand, the way back will take me 2 whole days (not counting the one night stopover I have in Tahiti).

posted @ 6:14 PM -

Maitai River, Nelson, South Island, New Zealand



January 5^th 2003

posted @ 5:35 PM -

While I try to find a job, I'm also catching up on 4 months of technical news and academic papers, partly because I'm interested and partly so that when I interview it will be clear that I am keeping myself up to date with such things. I was particularly struck by a short piece I've just read in the last-but-one Economist Technology Quarterly, about the correlation between how trusting a society is and the speed of its internet uptake.

One thing the story doesn't mention (probably because it's rather hard to quantify or back up with real facts) is how astonishingly gullible a large proportion of internet users are. Next time I get an obviously hoax virus alert or chain letter I'll bear this in mind: it is in the nature of the internet's skewed sample of the world population that the very trusting are over-represented online.

posted @ 10:46 PM -

Bra fence?

There was an item on the radio news this morning that caught my ear, so to speak. It was about a supposed UFO sighting (looking at the photo it looks like dirt on someone's lens), but that wasn't what got my attention. It was the location, which I had to check in written media before I could be sure I'd heard it right: over Cardrona's famous bra fence

posted @ 6:49 PM -

The last I saw of the South Island, New Zealand



January 7^th 2003

posted @ 6:42 PM -

Windy Wellington

There are certain drawbacks to living here - today it is difficult to walk around the waterfront because the wind's so damn strong, and apparently this is fairly normal.

posted @ 6:09 PM -

apparently 15 people have found this site by searching for the phrase manly halal.

posted @ 6:32 AM -

A note to web developers

Usability does not only mean making it as quick as possible for people to do what you expect them to do on your site. It is intensely irritating to spend half an hour searching for flights on a US website, only to discover that when it won't accept my credit card (because it's billed to a UK address) I have to start the process from scratch with their UK partner site. I won't name any names, but you know it would have been really easy to get one site to send data to the other. If it wasn't for their competitors quoting me double the fare, they would have just lost a sale. Grrrr....

[Added 5 minutes later] It is even more intensely irritating when the UK partner quotes over 600 POUNDS for flights that would have been US$350 or so via the US site. One of the advantages of the web should be that it no longer matters where I am. They have just lost a sale because I may as well take the 24 hour train ride (Boston - Cleveland) if it costs that much to fly.

Incidentally Auckland - London costs slightly less than 400 pounds and is in the region of 20 times the distance.

[Added the next morning] Actually this is not a web usability problem, but one of profit maximisation. Expedia (I will name names now because I'm very annoyed about this) replied to my email asking why I couldn't buy these tickets from the US site, and made it clear that it's because they don't want me to. I'll find a US travel agent who can accept my credit card, and Expedia will lose my business, because they were too greedy and tried to make me pay the UK rate for 2 hour-long flights.

posted @ 5:57 AM -

minor technical detail - I have finally changed the settings on yaccs so that comments are timestamped in the New Zealand time zone, matching the posts themselves, rather than GMT. It's a retrospective change, so it shouldn't be too confusing, but if it seems like my friends get up in the middle of the night just to read this page, bear in mind that most of them are in the UK, so they are up in the middle of the night NZ time anyway.

posted @ 5:17 AM -

What travelling does and doesn't do for the traveller

It is a cliché of middle class British youth that school leavers who want to postpone their having to deal with the real world go travelling to either find themselves or somehow make themselves into better people. I remember thinking that maybe I should do such a thing at the time, deciding not to for an extremely bad reason (it was on account of a girlfriend; not necessarily a bad reason, but in this specific case we split up a few months later), and then getting to university and finding that those who had been travelling were in no way better people. I did envy them the good times they had had, but I didn't feel like I was in any way stunted by not having travelled in the same way myself.

Now that I have done it I can confirm that if you are an 18 year old looking for personal development you should get on yer bike and get a job. It's not that I wouldn't reccommend travelling to others - far from it - but the traveller circuit is such an unnatural environment that it does absolutely nothing for personal development, whereas I definitely feel like the things that have made me grow up the most were the first few proper (as opposed to temping or work experience) jobs I had.

On the other hand, if you are looking to have a lot of fun, experience a blissfully complete lack of responsibility to anyone but yourself, and learn something about the world outside your home patch, you should definitely go travelling, alone, for as long as you can afford to. It is important to plan certain things properly - the people I met who had under-budgeted were not having much fun - but it's really very easy to get around much of the world, and not that much needs deciding in advance.

I didn't go travelling expecting to find myself, partly because I'm not sure what that means. I did learn a certain amount about myself at the very worst point - after being bitten by that dog and convincing myself [wrongly, in case you were worried] that I had been given a useless rabies vaccine - but that was basically a negative lesson. I learned that I am not invincible, and not the rock of total self-reliance I liked to believe I am. I also learned one positive thing, which was that when I have a real problem (as opposed to when they invent a problem to worry about on my behalf) my parents are more helpful than anyone else could possibly be. Strange that I had to get very far away from them to realise this, but many things don't make sense in parent-child relationships.

I did expect to become more self-assured through travelling, and I did expect a certain broadening of the mind. I've already written about how few of my beliefs were challenged en route, and how that actually worries me a little, but I do still feel it's good to go and see how different peoples' lives can be in different places. However, anyone setting off in search of that should be warned: there aren't many places that are easily accessible where people live lives radically different from Europeans. Mongolia is the only place where I really feel like I saw a completely unfamiliar lifestyle, and that is the main reason why I still consider it the highlight of my trip, even after all the fun I had in south-east Asia.

The big disappointment, though, comes on the self-assurance front, which was the one way in which I thought the experience really would improve me. After a little practice I found it really easy to cruise into a new hostel, make myself at home, and find people to hang around with for as long as I would be in town. That in itself is both good and unsurprising, but I was really hoping this would transfer to the rest of my life. In fact, part of the reason why I did the travelling on the way here, thereby exposing myself to the coming southern winter (rather than flying to NZ at the end of winter 2002 and setting off on the reverse of the journey I've just done as NZ starts to cool down this year), was the idea that it would make the fresh start here easier.

Instead, I have been more prey to the general did I just say something stupid insecurities that always crop up when meeting new people. I've been trying to work out why this is, and I think it's actually because making short-term friends quickly on the travellers' circuit is so extremely easy. The most artificial thing about travelling is that it really didn't matter what other people thought of me, because if no-one liked me in a particular town I knew I wouldn't have to hang around there for long. Paradoxically that makes it much easier to make a good impression. It also means that far from having become better at making friends in a 'normal' context, I am rather out of practice. I don't think I'm doing anything stupid, and I think I'm a pretty easy person to get on with, but I just keep questioning silly little things, because suddenly I care whether these people will still want me around next week.

I'm sure this will pass, once I am more settled and have a job, but for the moment I'm finding the excitement of the new just about cancelled about by this pervasive insecurity.

posted @ 4:25 AM -

Civic Centre, Wellington, New Zealand



January 10^th 2003

posted @ 4:08 AM -

Some belated New Year's Resolutions

I don't normally bother with New Year's Resolutions, because the 1^st of January is never a significant milestone in my life. This year, however, the transition from travelling to looking for a job and house marks a really major transition, and I do intend to use this to set myself in some of the good habits that are so much easier to start at times such as this than in the normal flow of life. In the spirit of Andrea's (not) smoking journal, I think it might be useful to put these online as a way of holding myself to account:

• Eat less crap. The odd greasy take-away is fine, but I used to mar a healthy basic diet [as in, the food I ate at home was reasonably healthy] with far too many chocolate bars and packs of crisps. Just replacing them with fruit should turn my diet from over-fatty to quite a healthy one, because my home cooking is good for me
• Eat less take-aways and ready food. More for financial reasons than health - a lot of my take-aways in Brighton were sandwiches for lunch, and they weren't too unhealthy, but a week's worth of those is one less CD I can afford to buy myself, and I know which gives me more pleasure
• Get back into martial arts. Not just join a club, but also train regularly on my own, something I haven't done properly for a few years
• Travel to and from work under my own steam. This is a matter of continuing the good habit I was in in Bristol, which made a noticeable difference to my health and how alive I felt in the mornings
• Write to or phone everyone who counts regularly enough that they know they count. I have a lot of catching up to do with this one. I would like to end this week with no-one left who I feel I unfairly haven't written to in ages. I doubt I'll manage, but I am trying
• Publish my photos. I have a couple of thousand photos on various CDs, and the main reason I wanted a digital camera in the first place was the ease of sharing them. Not much use while they are all off-line
• Make some progress with my grandfather's Jewish history notes. I started this project in good faith, but also knowing it would take me years. That's no excuse for having made no progress at all in the last 9 or 10 months.
• Learn another language. I'm not sure whether it should be Turkish (my own heritage), Maori (the culture of this land) or Spanish (because I want to travel in South America when I next get time), but I should start with one soon because the activity itself is rewarding anyway
• Explore New Zealand. I have seen too little of the UK in spite of living most of my life there, and I know that once I have a job here it will be easy to spend every weekend being lazy in town, but the beauty of this land is one of the main reasons I'm here, and if I don't get out and see a lot of the country it will be one hell of a missed opportunity

I'll look back at this when I leave New Zealand. I wonder how I'll rate my performance then....

posted @ 4:03 AM -

Some people may recognise the mugshot in this article: Obscure unpublished novelist joins the elite.

Thanks to Sam for pointing this one out to me.

posted @ 2:23 AM -

Returning to normality

Since Friday I've been staying in a spare room in a very nice house, with spectacular views, in Roseneath (see map), with some friendly people, one of whom is a friend of a friend, and therefore my closest contact in Wellington. Unfortunately I can't stay there long term because they don't want to let that last room out, but just living in someone's house rather than a hostel has helped me feel a bit more settled. I'm deriving an unusual amount of pleasure from simple things like cooking, just because I haven't been able to do them for a while. I started with biber dolma for all the 'family', which seemed like an appropriate way to thank them for lettnig me stay.

The people here are being very nice indeed, inviting me out with them, showing me around town, and providing generally useful advice on such things as finding a job and a place to live longer term. All the same I am feeling a little insecure, having no job, no permanent address, and no friends within a reachable distance who I've known for more than a week. I knew this would be inevitable when I took myself so far from home to start afresh, and I was sort of prepared for it (actually I'd go so far as to say that making myself face this and deal with it is one of the reasons I'm here, having been a little too comfortable for the last few years), but I expected the 4 months of travelling to make it easier, when if anything it's making it worse. More on that later.

Still, I have taken a step in the right direction by getting out of the hostel, because although it was a reasonably good one and conveniently located, it was making me feel too temporary. Now I can start budgeting more carefully and eating better, and just generally setting myself in good habits I want to keep while I'm here, rather than the lazy habits of a traveller.

posted @ 1:37 AM -