The Unreasonable Man

I am grumpy. CDW Canada has not shipped my laptop today as promised - another promise-breaker I cannot trust. They will presumably blame it on Lenovo breaking their promise. Like I care: I only placed the order there because they promised Wednesday delivery.
Not a great flight coming back from San Francisco. An hour late, the crew was like the Post Office (passengers were an annoyance to them, etc) and all toilets broke, and the rear ones plugged up, so only the front one was available for several hundred people - and the front is where I was sitting, so all I saw for four hours was an endless queue shuffling by my seat. Flushing was by bottles of mineral water, until they ran out too.
The bright point was that I watched “Volver”. In a previous life I was Latin: I love Italy, I love French and Spanish movies, and of course I love Penelope Cruz (though you do not have to be Latin for that).

It has been raining all day here in south Silicon Valley, but I am OK with that. It is almost extra beautiful. That said, making photos is difficult here, because you cannot simply stop the car along highways. So, not much to show.

“Aqui?”, the room cleaner asked when she wanted to know where to leave the blanket. This is America: throughout this country, room cleaners speak only Spanish.

Navigation on this trip has been easy due to the TomTom ONE, a GPS receiver. Fantastic device, and fun. I travel with it from now on: when renting it is even more important to not have to look at a map while driving. Enter address, go. Color screen, voice instructions, wide trange of options. My only criticisms:

• Ontario is not a “state”, Tom Tom.
• Tom Tom Phone support does not work (silence and a click is all you get).
• The Dutch background of this thing shows. In Anglo-saxon countries, addresses are not written as “Saddler Circle 1234″, but as “1234 Saddler Circle”.
• The ONE comes with out of date PC software 1.2 - which has an awful interface and simply does not work. In spite of that, he online update function says “it is up to date”. But it aint: updating manually to the version off the Tomtom web site (try to find it - almost impossible) fixes all the issues.
• The tomtom itself is also out of date, but not until you update the PC software can you update the Tomtom.

So support is not great - but the machine itself is. My advice is really very simple: get one.

I just watched The Oscars. Incestuous, irrelevant, predictable, yes. But the overwhelming impression left is one of “sic transit gloria mundi”. I salute the doddering confused Clint Eastwood and the totally bald Jack Nicholson for even appearing in public, the way they looked.

Huh? We have Al Gore at the Oscars tonight, pushing green behaviour. And we can learn how to save the planet on www.oscar.com. Oh boy. Al Gore, and now the Oscars telling us how to be green. This sort of nannying takes away from the scientific approach we need to take to this, and the Oscars doing a “green” show seems just a tad insincere: if there is anything the antithesis of green, it is surely Hollywood.

I am in the Bay Area this weekend. Today, I drove.

In the a nice rented car (Hotwire, cheap) I drove through the California I love. That is Skyline boulevard, through the hills and forests south of San Francisco. One of the most beautiful roads that I know - anywhere. And mere minutes from Silicon Valley.

The restaurant I really like, Bella Vista, was closed as it always is on Sunday, so instead, lunch was at a burger restaurant on Skyline Boulevard, surrounded by (mostly, but not all aged) hippies. Fantastic.

I like just driving up and down 101 and looking at the towns I pass: Menlo Park; Cupertino; Stanford; Palo Alto. Where the IT industry was born and history is still being made.

I am on the road again today: Air Canada will take me to San Francisco for some meetings Monday.

I woke up this morning to snow in the back yard:

And with that snow, some more interesting poll results. In an unscientific poll by Global TV, most people (73%) said that “Protecting Canadians Against Terrorism” is more important to them than “Protecting Civil Liberties (27%)”. Those 73%, I think, are the people that make dictatorships possible. Every tyrant uses the same excuse to “temporarily” reduce civil liberties. No, Canada is not threatened with tyranny right now - but that is luck, not deisgn, and given enough time, someone will come up with a way to exploit a population so willing to give away liberties that affect all, to protect against infinitesimally small dangers.

Also odd is a news poll that seems to suggest that most viewers are in favour of banning incandescent lightbulbs. I am all in favour of using energy efficient fluorescent bulbs (I have a house full of them), but people who want to ban lightbulbs in favour of them overlook a few important facts:

• Energy-efficient bulbs cannot be dimmed.
• Energy-efficient bulbs take energy to manufacture.
• Energy-efficient bulbs contain more raw materials and chemicals than a lightbulbs (metal, glass, done).
• Replacing all current incandescent bulbs with energy-efficient bulbs  would cost an enormous  amount of money - and energy.
• A law like that cannot be effectively enforced.
• If you allow the government to dictate how people use energy, what is next? Car rationing? Airconditioning minimum temperatures? Holiday prevention? Hot food prohibition? Oven sanctions?

Better, I think, to educate and incentivise. All you need to do to ensure energy efficiency, I think, is educate (ensure that people know how much an energy-efficient lamp saves them per month) and incentivise (reduce price of energy for low users). You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar. Right?

No! Please - not an atheist!

USA Today/Gallup polled Americans as to who would be a suitable president. 72% would vote for a Mormon; 45% for an atheist.

That really is sooo primitive.

I am back from New York, whose slightly surrealist view from the office is here:

I just cancelled the Dell PC. It turns out that dell was lying after all - instead if delivery by Thursday, the Bangalore call centre now (after repeated never-returned calls) said 10 more business days and it wasn’t their fault. They had very evidently just been flat out lying to get the order. Well, by doing that (and only giving me people in Bangalore to talk to, who never return calls as promised), Dell today lost the chance to convert my company to Dell.

I looked at the local stores. Nada, except an HP DV9260US for $2600 (nice, but it has an HD-DVD drive I don’t want, and a slower video card, and is $300 too expensive) and perhaps even Macs - but the Powerbook that comes closest (MA610LLA? The only one with 2GB RAM) was $2700 as well, and I could not figure out how to tell screen resolution (just right-clicking on anything to get context actions and information is something the Mac sorely lacks).

There is of course plenty of unusable crap around $1000, but that is really unusable (like, XGA screens; errors; and a four-minute startup time); a good laptop around $2500 is impossible to find - or if you order online, to actually receive.

This is all very frustrating: when you are willing to spend money the vendors should make that easy, not difficult.

New York has a name for rude service: last night, a pizza and later dessert and a coffee in Little Italy showed that this reputation is deserved. We were served by first the Pizza Nazi, then the Dessert Nazi.

My hotel, the oddly misspelled “Millenium” Hilton, looks out right over Ground Zero, where the WTC buildings used to stand.