Wombling in Wimbledon

I know I haven't blogged much lately - not because I haven't had anything to say, as that I haven't cared enough to say it (been alternately busy and bored, and when I'm busy I don't have time to blog, and when I'm bored I don't feel like blogging).

So what have I been up to? Well, I went to Superman Returns at the IMAX, in 3D, which was pretty cool but not as much as I'd expected. The 3D was fun, but there were a lot of little kiddies (odd, considering the movie was rated 12A) and they were constantly explaining things to each other and talking and being a nuisance, in general. The movie itself was a bit disappointing as well (although maybe I was irritated by the kiddies and just didn't appreciate its finer points). I've gotten used to watching Smallville, and I kept expecting those actors... also, Superman in the movies is rather... simple. Clark Kent not only has no personality, he doesn't seem very intelligent either; and Superman isn't particularly complex either. Whereas in Smallville, Clark Kent is a real, complex person. They should rather have made a Smallville movie. But it was fun.

Then last week we went to the British Motor Show, which was great fun. We tried out all the bikes (although there weren't very many - and while Honda had car test drives, they didn't have any test bikes). Unfortunately it turns out that the CBR600RR is too high for me (my feet barely touch the ground, and there's no way I could take the weight of the bike even just on one foot). We went bike shopping afterwards, and I tried out a couple of Hondas but I'm just too short :-( Looks like the Aprilia RS250 or the Honda VFR400R are recommended for short riders, so I'm looking into getting one of those... problem is, it's a lot easier to buy a new bike because you can just go into the shop and ask for one; buying a 2nd bike is harder not only because you have to judge the state of the bike, but also because you need to find one in the first place! No luck so far...

And then, not so much something I've done, as something I'm going to be doing: I'm moving to Wimbledon next week, which I'm quite excited about. I've complained here before about sharing a flat with other people, and now I'm going to get a place of my own, and in Wimbledon to boot! It's small - kitchen and lounge combined, a tiny bathroom and a decent sized bedroom, all on different levels - but it'll be all mine. So next weekend I'll be moving - it'll be a schlepp to move all my stuff across, since I've managed to accumulate an amazing amount of stuff in the four or five months that I've been here, so it'll probably take me most of the weekend to do it. And I'll have to organise to change the gas and electricity and phone line and council tax into my name (still don't quite know how to go about that, or when), and I'll have to organise broadband as well, which might take a week or two. At least I'll be able to check my mail on my phone, but it'll be a bummer being without decent internet access. But, on the good side, it'll be great watching what I want on tv when I want, doing my washing when I want, getting up late if I want and not worrying about missing my shower slot, and, I can sing along to my iPod again :-) (very badly, of course... that goes without saying).

Oh, and two other things I've done: I've booked my flights home for a two week visit in November (and *that'll* be painful - no mobile and no internet and no internet on my mobile for two weeks!). And I've decided to go to Lapland for Christmas! It sounds really cool, and it's an interesting thing to do any time of the year - but over Christmas it'll just be that much better, and I won't have to sit at home by myself. I'm still trying to decide between the 2 night and 3 night tours (luckily Christmas is on a Monday this year, so it's 4 days off all in a row!).

So that's what I've been up to - and there's been work, of course, which there always is. And shopping, although I'm trying not to buy new stuff now just to have to cart it across to Wimbledon next week ;-)

Gates in SA

So Bill Gates now wants to help the people of South Africa get computers and get connected to the net. A nice idea, in theory, but somewhat problematic in practice.

First, getiing everyone a computer and an internet connection is not going to solve their problems. Someone who lives in a tin shack, without water, electricity, healthcare or food is not going to benefit from having a computer, even if it was free and ran off sunlight. Sure, information and education is key but most of south africa hasn't got to that point yet - if you're illiterate, you're not going to be able to use a computer. The most that I can see being useful is
having a community centre, with a computer literate teacher and helper.

The idea is that people can buy computers with 'microsoft starter software' - I'll get back to that one in a minute - and pay them off over time. So people who have very little money can now get themselves deeper in debt. Good idea. A recent report showed that about half of all South Africans live on less than R20 per day - they're going to take a long, long, time to pay off even a cheap computer. Maybe he's not aiming at the really poor, the rural communities and informal settlements, though - the article mentioned targeting the lower-middle-to-middle-income market.

Another aim is to get cheap broadband - I'm all for that, but I wonder if he realises the extent of the problem, and how restrictive the legislation is? And while the article doesn't explicitly say so, I think the implication is that the cheap broadband comes as a package with the cheap starter computer. Which would eliminate all of us who have decent, high-spec pc's but can't afford thousands a month for broadband (because it's not just the really poor who can't afford it - it's anyone who isn't very well off or very dedicated to being connected). And it's mtn wireless broadband, at that, so they need to drastically improve their coverage areas if this is going to work.

Of course this is partly just a ploy to get MS software into every little nook and cranny of the world (another report, which I can't find now, showed the main reason people use MSOffice is because everyone else uses it! so it's in their interests to get many people using it as possible, even at a loss) The concept of this 'starter software' is particularly annoying, both in the sense of trying to lock new users into MS software (OpenOffice is free, why not provide that instead?), but also the restrictions that they're placing on the software, in theory to make it cheaper. The
problem with that is that the software is already there, in full working order, and it won't actually cost them anything more to provide this software - it'll cost more, actually, to pay developers to build in these ridiculous restrictions. And so the main of aim of providing cut down software can't be to make it more affordable, but to prevent lost income by making people who can afford the full version to want that instead of the cheap version. Which is fair enough, but then say so, don't bill it as being generous and helpful and worried about affordability in order to score brownie points. And if the one example they give is typical of the rest, the restrictions really are ridiculous: only allowing two windows open at a time! How on earth does that affect the affordability of the software?!

Maybe I'm just cynical, but I always feel that these 'help the poor old 3rd world countries' comes with with a touch of patronisation, a dollop of self-interest, and a catch.

Random Art

Just a couple of arty things I've come across in the last few days and think are really cool:

TheAsian Field - 180000 lumpy clay figures by Antony Gormley. You have to go look at the pic. "The art is not there to be looked at; it is looking at you." Very cool.
I saw a poem on the underground today. It was one of those where I just got an instant visceral reaction (pretty good considering that I read it as I was travelling down an escalator). I thought it was part of the Poems on the Underground project (which I really like, by the way, and think they should do more of), but it's actually part of the Platform for Art project. It's by Ugo Rondinone:
It's awesome.

I've been seeing a couple of A4 posters on my way to work in the mornings - a little cartoon drawing, one of a mouse, one of man, with the slogan "Practise random kindness and senseless acts of beauty". It's a great idea, the slogan really gets in your head. I wish I had the guts to actually do something in that spirit.

The Lakehouse

I was thinking of going to the Camden market today, but the weather looks pretty lousy so I think I'll just go to the library, do some shopping around here, and then read (the difficult bit is to not buy snacks to eat while I'm reading). But since the library only opens in an hour, and I don't have anything to do until then, I thought I'd write about the movie I saw yesterday, The Lakehouse.

It was really good, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. I know a lot of people have criticized it for being unrealistic, but that's just silly - once you accept the basic premise, that the letterbox somehow causes their letters to travel through time, the rest is internally consistent which is what counts. (Although I did wonder if the rest of their post also ends up in the wrong year! :-) Having said that, though, there are a couple of things that bothered me (you might not want to read further if you haven't watched the movie yet).

Some of it's just the normal time-paradox stuff - if there wasn't a tree by her apartment, and then he planted one for her in the past, would it really just appear suddenly in the future? Wouldn't it then have been there all along? Like when he had that conversation with her on her birthday - that she remembered, and those memories didn't just suddenly come into being. And when she prevented him from crossing the road that Valentine's day - what had he then been doing for the last 2 years? Was the drawing of the lakehouse still on the wall? Did he suddenly spring into existence like the tree, and have to explain to his brother why he wasn't dead, or was he just not dead all along, like the memories of the conversation?

Not that any of that weakens the movie - any movie that has information travelling between the past and the future is going to paradoxes to deal with, and there is no logical way for it to work.

But there are two bits in the movie that I just don't get. How did she know that he'd be at the lakehouse to get her message about not coming to see her on Valentine's day? And isn't a pretty big coincidence that he was there? I guess that's just a case of a fortuitous coincidence, which tends to happen a lot in movies.

The thing with the book, though, I don't get at all. It seems as though there was more to it, which they then cut out and the bit that was left didn't make much sense. Obviously I get it that she left the book behind, he went to fetch it for her, and said he'd give it to her one day. So far so good. But how did she discover it under the floorboards? It looked as though she was stamping around trying to find a loose floorboard, but then she looked surprised when she found it and found the book. And how did the book even get there, anyway? I'm pretty sure that was supposed to be in her apartment, which wasn't built yet in his time... If she'd been looking around the lakehouse and found it, it would have made a bit more sense.

There are some more issues over at imdb - some of them are valid (how *did* the tree grow so big in 2 years? And actually yes, I wondered at the time where the attic was).

But it was a good movie, and I enjoyed it overall. Same as I picked Troy to bits, because it gets so many things wrong, but have watched it a bunch of times and enjoyed it every time (although that might have something to do with Brad Pitt, Eric Bana and Orlando Bloom....). I plan to go watch Superman Returns, next Sunday - not only is it my birthday, they're showing it at the imax (with super 3D scenes! yay!). So hopefully that'll be good - the original Superman movies were fine at the time, but Superman was fairly 2 dimensional (and now he'll be 3D! although that's not quite what I meant ;); watching Smallville, Clark is really a complex, normal person, with real feelings and conflicts and all, and to watch a movie where he goes back to being simple would be quite disappointing. But it should be interesting regardless.