Things that annoy me

Currently in Buenos Aires (great city by the way!) and chilling out after a fairly hectic week travelling and because there is free fast internet in this pariticular hostel (The Hostel Inn - Buenos Aires), so here I am surfing away and reading various news articles, catching up on emails and all that and I come across a train of articles from Slash dot that grabbed my attention..

• The View from the top


• The View from the top: Redux


• Warcraft: Another point of View

Now as many of you know I've been interested in computers, games and psychology for quite a while and this is why I was fascinated by these articles, the fairly recent phenomenon of MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games) has interested me partially from the gamer side but more from the psych side of things..

Tired and slightly enebriated at the moment (4 pesos for a litre of beer) so just trying to get my head together with what I want to say, there are basically two points I want to make:

Point 1: Addiction

Addiction can take many forms, the usual process is developing a chemical addiction that leads onto a (harder to break) psychological one. One of the things I am consistently surprised about is comments like this:

"It is not comparable to a drug addiction in any way. It's not physical, it's mental. You had the choice to stop at any time. It's only when people started disrespecting your power that you gave up."

Quite simply (and sorry mum & dad to this) I used to smoke and yes this is initially a physical addiction (the nicotine) but when you stop smoking that only takes a maximum of 3-4 weeks for it to completely clear from your system (it's mostly gone in the first few days the rest is your body no longer needing/desiring that substance), so if addiction is only 'physical' why the hell 4-5 years later do I still feel the occasional craving for a cigarrete?



When people get it through their thick skulls that addiction and mental illnesses cannot be treated as purely physical illnesses the world will be a better place.

Point 2: Misguided anger

"All the time you are putting into WOW, you could be putting somewhere else. The real world has problems. If everyone that played WOW stopped playing it, turned to their neighbors and community and said what can I do to help, that would be an accomplishment. Getting to lvl 60 isn't. In 20 years no one is going to remember you did it, no one is going to care."

I am quite passionate about space travel/research and one of the most common complaints when any money is invested in anything to do with space (in particular science missions to the other planets in our solar system let alone possibilities of manned missions) is that the money could of been spent on more worthy causes.. My irke with the above quote and that general argument is that the world has a hell of a lot of really worthy causes (for me space is a more worthy cause than some others, though not all)...

That kind of statement is designed to do 2 things, it is designed for the writer to feel superior (not just to the target but also to everyone else) because they obviously have more 'lofty goals' even though they are spending some of that critical time reading articles about World of Warcraft and complaining about people who play it.

It is also designed to try and get you to do something out of guilt (in this case it is just a generic go and help out your neighbours), I actually agree with a lot of the end goals, they are actually worthy causes and I personally spend time on lots of them (raising money for various charities, spending my time on writing software for medical research, spending time with family and friends, talking to those different from me, generally trying to leave the world a better place than when I arrived...) but to me the ends does not justify the means, if you want me to help with a cause ask me, don't tell me I shouldn't of had that sandwich or that I shouldn't of spent that time doing whatever... The point is don't tell what I shouldn't of done, tell me what I can do.

This is actually my biggest peeves it is why I will:

• Flick the channel during guilt ridden requests for donations


• Walk past a hawker for the best restaurant in the world


• Ignore the issues that people like this wave flags about (there are many worthy causes in the world that I'd rather spend my time on)

and so ends yet another rambling rant...

B

Bored?

Try Virtual bubblewrap

Internet Banking while travelling

Just a short comment on this topic.. As we've been travelling around we've needed to check our bank accounts:

• Checking how much money we've been spending
  
• Paying that important credit card bill
  
• etc...
  

You know the deal, but one of the challenging things is that you don't ever really know how secure the net cafe you are using, sometimes (I think once in Peru) you come across a pc that is actually secure (it's got a legitimate copy of XP, virus scanner & a firewall) but mostly you don't get any of those...

The end result is that I spend anything up to an hour (depending on how reliable/fast the net connection is) checking and securing the pc before I can do any banking (or whatever secure stuff I may want to do)...

Luckily there are lots of downloadable tools that I can use for free for a limited time period, but ideally what I'd like is a little usb key that I can plug in and it tells me whether or not this pc is secure and gives me the option to make it secure (if I've only got 15mins I don't want it to automatically secure it)

Ok, that was a random rant (not even a good rant at that), but it's just something that I've been fighting with recently... Also an idea for a product, particularly for travellers but also as net cafes are becoming more and more common

B

Hot showers

Just a small note for those of you wanting to travel in South America and 'possibly' make use of a hot shower... Here are some instructions found at a hostel in Nasca

1. Turn tap on (to let freezing cold water out)
   
2. Now turn on electricity switch, must be done after water starts running*
   
3. Hot water should now be coming out of shower head (watch out for those electricity wires)
   
4. Do NOT turn off water when you've finished shower! Instead reach over and turn off electricity switch (with soapy wet hands)
   
5. Now you can turn off the water...
   

As far as I can tell a lot of the showers have a kettle element in the shower head (with semi-covered wires running to the walls)... I for one feel very safe.

* For those that are curious that electricity switch resembles the classic Frankenstein power switch (think bare metal lever)...

Keeping track of travels

Just a quick reminder for everyone if you want to keep track of where we´re up to in our round the world travels just jump onto our other blog :-)

Hope you´re all well and having fun!

B

in Peru

Well we're now in Peru and having a blast of a time, we've recovered from Jet Lag (well, mostly...) and have done some wandering around Lima... It's a nice enough city, but I can understand why so many people recommend not sticking around in Lima for to long... There really isn't that much to see, but some impressions I've had so far:

• Lima is more affluent than Mexico City (on a whole)
  
• Everything is really cheap here (a 6 pack of beer costs S/.12.55 which works out to be about 2.50 pounds)
  
• Keyboards over here are taking me a little while to get used to, similar to some Dutch keyboards but with some extra variations...
  
• Inka Kola, which is kind of like Creamy Soda has tartarzine (sp?) which is a chemical that was banned in the UK about a decade ago... Still quite tasty though (if you don't mind the fluro yellow glo)
  

Off to Nasca on the morrow (damn exciting to do so!!)...

B

It's real

Yes, it's taken quite a long time to come around, but finally the day has happened. I am now a married man! :-)

It was a beautiful day with my beautiful bride, and I couldn't help smiling the whole way through it :-D

To everyone who made it, thank you for joining us for our special day, for those who couldn't I hope to see you in Melbourne in December!!

Next, the adventure to come!

B

Air accidents

Saw this on one of my favourite comic sites this morning (Bunny).

It says:

http://www.airdisaster.com/view_year.cgi?year=2001

Air Accident (The Entire World - pop.est 6,630,000,000)

2001 1,752 Fatalities (including 9/11/01 passengers)



http://www.statistics.gov.uk/STATBASE/xsdataset.asp?vlnk=5680

Accidental Falls (The UK Alone - pop.est 60,441,000)

2000 4,281 Fatalities

Just a kindly statistical reminder -

You are more likely to die falling out of your bed in the morning than in a terrorist attack...

...so someone please tell Mr Bush to stop freaking out.



Have a cup of tea, that seems to work out quite well

Gig tonight

Off to see The Cat Empire tonight.. Really looking forward to it :-)

"This was an early description of the music and the Band: Where reggae meets Hip-Hop, where jazz is played with dirty hands, where a Cuban line meets an Aussie rule, where nothing seems in place but sounds like one place played in an earthy chord. This is the Island where The Cat Empire was born?"

is one way to describe their music :-)

Google - temporarily unavailable

Google has quite a nice home page option (go to: www.google.com/ig), where you can add on your own panels...

I've got some news items, a list of weather reports from a couple of countries (I can compare London to Melbourne) and a few fun things..

One of the first panels I made use of was Google Mail (as I don't get email to that account too often, and so I don't need to check it all the time), however in the last week or so it has been broken 'Information is temporarily unavailable', this really disappoints me about Google, as they used to be so responsive to problems, fixing them so quickly... Maybe they're just getting too big, they've got too many meetings to go to and so now 'temporarily broken' no longer means minutes (or maybe hours), now it's weeks, maybe even months....

Is this a sign of things to come?

As an additional bit of evidence, blogger (which is owned by Google), recently introduced 'Word Verification' when doing posts (I can totally understand why they've done it as well), however it has now broken all the 3rd party tools that you used to be able to use to do the posts... Including Google's own Toolbar, where you don't even get an error message, you just get 'NULL' after you submit (or save) a post... And of course you post that you just carefully wrote, is now missing...

B

Fridge theives

Got this email this morning... An 'interesting' way of dealing with certain freeloaders:

If you are hungry or thirsty there are plenty of shops on Brick Lane & a reliable Tesco round the corner. There’s also a man who arrives calling ‘anyone for sandwiches’ who arrives in about 15 minutes selling food and drink if you find it difficult to leave the office. For those not wishing to spend money or exert themselves, there is water in a machine or taps in the kitchen to drink from - and sugar cubes if you’re hungry.

Unfortunately the food and beverages in the fridge are not for general consumption and I now join the club of those who can no longer afford to support someone else’s thirst or hunger for my hard earned PJ Smoothies. The current rate of 3 missing per week became too much so I decided to personalise the latest batch. Whoever took one today/yesterday may have noticed it had already been opened and had a slightly different taste and constituency. Still, sharing is caring as they say… especially when it comes to juices.

B

conversations

Perhaps some friends should take heed of this advice (you know who you are):

"The real art of conversation is not only to say the right thing at the right place but to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment."

- Dorothy Nevill

Who needs the 'n' key?

I mean seriously, how often do you need to type out the letter 'n'.. It's not that essential is it?



B

Cracker of a game!

That was an absolutely nail biting, enthralling, fantastic game! :-D



I hope to see Aus do well against Italy on Monday. Also keep your eye on Ghana, they're shaking up some of these old school European teams :-)



B

Does England exist?

Woo Hoo!

Aussie, Aussie, Aussie!!! :-D

So true

"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; In practice, there is."

- Chuck Reid

So true

"In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; In practice, there is."

- Chuck Reid

Bombs in chips

From The Age:

"Workers at a British factory making chips were evacuated twice last week after bomb parts turned up in potatoes imported from France and Belgium, site of battles in World Wars I and II. The Scarborough plant was emptied on Friday after a worker spotted a shell tip among potatoes as they were being cleaned for slicing."

In many ways funny, in others it's amazing... Just think what would of happened it that shell tip hadn't been spotted, and it had of gone into the slicer. Would it of produced a nice bang?

What will the think of next

I was in Boots today (a UK pharmacy), and I happened to notice this interesting little product

Magicool Hotweather Cooler

Thinking that sounded like it would be useful when heading to warmer climates, as it:

Instantly cools and refreshes your body and face on hot days and muggy nights.
CFC free, non-toxic and does not discolour fabrics.

I thought I'd look up what the magic ingredients were. I expected a list of incomprehensible numbers or maybe a patented chemical disclaimer, imagine my surprise when I found aqua; yes that's right, the secret (and only) ingredient is non other than water.

All for the bargain price of £4.99

B