This page represents only my own views, and not those of any university or other body.
Posted Thursday 6th October 2011 at 12.08pm
Jobsworth
My facebook feed is full of comments like "The world has lost a true innovator and leader. A man that proved that if you believe you can change the world, you will. Rest in Peace Steve Jobs." I must really have become a cynical mathematician, because my first reaction to this was "actually no, he perhaps proved that it's possible to change the world if you really believe it. He certainly didn't prove that everyone who believes they can change the world changes the world" and then my second reaction was "well, it depends what you mean by change the world..."
This reminds me of the joke about the mathematician, the physicist and the engineer on a train to Scotland. They cross the border and see a sheep out of the window. The engineer says "Look! Sheep in Scotland are black!" The physicist replies "Well, at least one sheep in Scotland is black," and the mathematician retorts "Look guys, all we know is that in Scotland there exists at least one sheep, at least one side of which is black."
I watched one of Steve Jobs' speeches once, at the announcement of the iPad 2, or maybe the iPhone 4, because I had heard the hype but never heard the guy speak. It was mainly him walking slowly up and down the stage saying "The iPad 2 (or iPhone 4) is 10% lighter, 10% faster, and has the same incredible battery life. This is not evolution, it's revolution," over and over again. Apparently walking slowly whilst telling obvious porkies is awesome.
Regardless, it's sad that he died, of course it is. He did a lot of great stuff. Even if you don't like Apple, you just have to like Finding Nemo.
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Posted Wednesday 5th October 2011 at 1.30pm
We know who our enemies are
This (from the occupation of Wall Street in New York) is pretty darn cool. There's something about mass singalongs to horn parts of songs I love that really gets me :)
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Posted Sunday 2nd October 2011 at 4.00pm
Mister Doubty and McClanger
Nigel Doughty has resigned as chairman of Nottingham Forest, the football club I support, after many years. He has received a lot of criticism from fans in the last couple of years and I would just like to put my views across.
There is little argument that Mr Doughty has overseen one of the worst periods in the club's history, and he cannot avoid taking some of the blame for that. Poor decisions have been made at key times, either by him or by people working for him. The relegation to the third tier of English football was an embarassment to everyone involved: Forest were the only club ever to have won the European Cup and then fallen so low in their domestic league.
But Mr Doughty did not shirk that embarassment; he carried on at the club, bankrolling the return to the Championship and appointing Billy Davies, who revitalised the team and so nearly secured promotion to the Premiership. He has often taken flak from fans with good humour. More importantly he wanted the best for the club, and gave a huge amount of his own money and time to try to make good things happen.
Those good things never quite materialised. The club in general, and Mr Doughty in particular, were stung by the reign of David Platt as manager. Appointed largely on the basis of his reputation as a player, he spent large amounts of money on three Italians from the backwaters of Serie A who all failed miserably in England; and his lack of tactical nous was obvious even to me, a somewhat casual observer (I did have a season ticket at the time).
This experience led the club to introduce the much-maligned "Transfers and Aquisitions Panel", under which signings were made by a committee. In theory this lessened the chances of such obviously bad purchases as Petrachi, Matrecano and Mannini. The TAP was actually not a bad idea in principle, and worked well for a time, but became unwieldy. And relying on David Pleat as your football consultant is beyond a joke - any sensible fan listening to the man commentating on ITV can tell you he's lost any expertees that he did have (and I would argue that his record as a manager even in his younger days was mediocre at best).
To a large extent the success or failure of clubs at Championship level comes down to a large dose of luck in having the right people at your club at the right time. Managers and players stay for such short periods , and coaches feted as the next big thing are often out of the door a year later. Even the very few bosses with well-established good records at a number of clubs sometimes fail horribly when put in the wrong situation - see Woy Hodgson's appointment at Liverpool, for example.
(Alex Ferguson is widely acknowledged as the best manager in English game, but has never been tested in charge of a smaller side. I would be very interested to see him take charge at a club like, say, Ipswich (or Forest!) and see what he makes of it.)
So I would like to say thanks to Mr Doughty. He may not always have made the right decisions, but I have no doubt that he always made what he though were the best decisions for the club. Clearly the fans want more than that; I hope, of course, that they get what they wish for, but more importantly than that I hope the club continues to receive such generous care and support from whoever replaces Mr Doughty as chairman.
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Posted Tuesday 27th September 2011 at 10.37pm
Waiting for Kirsten
I was back in my hometown of Gothenburg this summer, and one day my friend calls me up who works at this shitty hotel in the city, and she says "You'll never guess who just checked in!" And I say "Is it Kirsten Dunst?" And she says "Yes." Now I don't know much about Kirsten Dunst, I haven't seen any of her movies. But the thing is she mentioned me once in an interview she did in a newspaper, and I've been trying not to be too impressed by that. Thing is that I grew up in a suburb next to a potato chips factory, standing there like a tombstone with two gigantic chimneys coming out of it; and so what is a suburban potato chips factory boy like me to do when Kirsten comes to my home town except obsessively stalk her all night?
In Gothenburg we don't have VIP lines,
In Gothenburg you're not worth less and you're not worth any more.
But times are changing, Kirsten...
Göta älv is slowly reversing;
The VIP lines are not to the clubs
But to healthcare, apartments and jobs.
Yeah, Jens has a new EP. The first two songs are good.
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Posted Sunday 25th September 2011 at 1.39pm
The quest for knowledge
There's a nice article by Will Hutton, about changes to funding for universities in the UK, here.
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Posted Saturday 24th September 2011 at 6.22pm
VPN and DHCP
This is a bit of a technical post. I won't attempt to explain what all the words and acronyms mean, mainly because I don't know what most of them mean, but if anyone else has had the same problem then it could still be useful.
This morning I tried to VPN into a server in the UK. It wouldn't work. I tried Windows and Ubuntu, and neither would connect - or, occasionally, they would connect but then lose the connection within a minute or two. Sometimes they mentioned error 619. The router I have here is a Linksys WRT54G v5, which apparently has had a lot of problems with this kind of thing, so there are a lot of suggestions on the net that I tried and which didn't work.
It turned out to be something to do with both my modem and my router attempting to control DHCP for my computer. To fix this I had to log into my router (if you don't know the username and password for your router, the defaults are normally admin/admin or admin/1234 or admin/(blank), where (blank) means actually leave the box blank, don't write (blank)) and change the connection type from "Automatic configuration - DHCP" to "PPPoE". I then had to put in a username and password, which I think are the username and password for the internet connection (I'm not sure as I've just moved here and am using the network that someone else has set up). I saved those changes and hey presto, VPN now works.
I got this suggestion from here - their walkthrough includes things like restoring factory defaults, which I found unnecessary.
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Posted Tuesday 20th September 2011 at 3.53pm
First impressions
I arrived in Canada yesterday. There was a bit of a wait at immigration while a Canadian woman tried to get an Indian man (with French nationality) to speak French. She refused to believe his French ID was genuine until he spoke some French to her. He was a bit weird, but unless you have to not be weird to enter Canada... he clearly spoke French as he was answering the woman's French questions perfectly well, albeit in English. He kept making irrelevant points ("I worked for Air France for 30 years!"); she was quite rude ("Je m'en fous, monsieur, je m'en fous!"). But at least it gave me something to watch until it was my turn to collect my work permit, and that meant that I then didn't have to wait to collect my luggage, which is my least favourite part of flying.
Then there was the bus into town, and the first thing I saw when I got off was a park with several games of giant chess going on. One of those "I think I'm going to like this" moments, like the first time I listened to the Hold Steady ("There are nights when I think that Sal Paradise was right..."). 10 minutes' walk up the hill, past loads of cafés and restaurants, and I was at the apartment. My flatmate Jeremy, a biology postdoc, gave me a brief tour before heading back into the lab; I skyped my parents to let them know I'd arrived, sent a few emails, and headed out to the supermarket. On the way I passed scores more restaurants and bars - French, Greek, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Vietnamese, Indian, Lebanese (probably loads more that I've forgotten) and of course the ubiquitous English pub. The supermarket was pretty good too, although some stuff seemed expensive compared to UK prices. A quick meal - just pasta with cheese sauce, spring onion, sweetcorn and red pepper - and I gave in to the jetlag. 10 hours' sleep.
This morning I gathered some documents together and set off to try to get some admin done. First stop was McGill maths reception, where after some confusion I was given a run-through of the different things I had to do, a key to office 1212, and a name tag for the office door. Up to the office then; but ah, someone sat inside tells me that there are already four occupants for the four desks. Back down to reception, where the receptionist tells me that "Wang, Z" is not on her list and should not be in the office. But I point out that he is on the staff list stuck to the reception desk, and indeed it lists his office as 1212; and besides, he wasn't actually in the office himself when I called, so what was I supposed to do, pick up his stuff and put it outside the door? She asks me to return tomorrow. I've now received an email telling me that one of the other occupants should not be there. This still doesn't answer the question of what I'm supposed to do with the illegal alien's belongings, so we shall see what happens tomorrow. I suppose it would be too much to ask that I get a desk straight away with no complications. In Bath I was shunted around for my whole PhD; the only time I ever had an office in the department was when I spent three weeks in a seminar room with a couple of clunky old computers shared between 6 of us. In Paris I started in the "visiting professors" office with the man who spent all his time on the phone speaking Italian loudly, and when we moved to the new building there was nothing - not even a chair or a desk - in my room. And neither the heating nor the internet worked. In Berlin things were better, but still I was in a building across the road from the rest of my group, with construction work going on downstairs which meant that at various times either the lifts or the stairs were out of action.
So, onto the health insurance office. There was a queue to see a woman to get a ticket to join another queue; after this I saw a woman who insisted on speaking French to me (on the plus side, she did tell me my French was good; this is a lie, but shows a markedly different attitude towards the language compared to that of the French from France), who registered me and then told me to rejoin the queue to get my photo taken for the ID card. After an interminable wait I decided that I could spend this time more profitably by filling in some of the forms that I need to return to McGill tomorrow; but of course 2 minutes later my number beeped up on the board, I had my photo taken, and I was out of there. All in all this was a fairly painless experience: it took about 90 minutes, 80 of which were spent in queues, and could have been improved by some kind of estimated waiting time information, but at least all they required was a work permit and $8, and it was all done in one place and in one visit.
Then home, filling in forms, and looking at mobile phones and bank accounts. All part of the joys of moving to a new country.
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Posted Sunday 18th September 2011 at 9.29pm
Maple Leaves
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Posted Wednesday 14th September at 10.31am
Curtly
Curtly Ambrose has been inducted into the International Cricket Council's hall of fame. People being inducted into the ICC's hall of fame isn't normally something to really care about, but Curtly was probably the best - and certainly the scariest - fast bowler I've ever seen. This match is one of my first, and most haunting, cricket memories. And there's a nice piece about Curtly here.
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Posted Sunday 11th September 2011 at 1.08pm
NO WALKIE TIME!
1:49:09 from the gun, which should be just under 1hr 48 from when I actually crossed the start line. I had a different song in my head today...
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