Year: 2005

Well not quite evil but close to it. I chose Scottish Gas for electricity/gas supply because they would let me sign up online. Scottish Power’s website only gave me a big notice saying “you need to use Internet Explorer”. So an easy choice there.

Today someone from Scottish Power comes round saying they are reviewing my details and want to check to see if I’m paying the correct amount. Somewhat suspicious I point out that I’m not a customer of Scottish Power but oh no Scottish Power are indeed my actual supplyer (true, for some definition of supplyer) and it’s important that they review to make sure I’m paying the correct amount. Is this a marketing call? No. Being the trusting sort, and brought up to believe that no means no I show the bills. So she looks at the bills, tuts at how I’m paying for an estimated amount, tuts at the kilowatt hours I’m paying and says it should really be only 1.7, a bit more scribbles etc. She looks at the metres, somehow making it believable that she is doing something with them when it’s quite clear she’s using it as an excuse to get into the house and not be left standing on the doorstep. Is this me on the bills? Oh but one of them is spelt wrong and one of them isn’t taken by direct debit, would I like to change my direct debit to be joint on both bills? Yes I would actually but that’s none of your business since I’m not your customer. You seem to be filling in a form for change of supplyer. No no, we are already your supplyer, she’s just changing it so I’m only going through one company instead of two. Politely told her I don’t wish to change supplyer thank you and I have good reasons for going with their competition (i.e. the website that mostly works).

When I lived in Bridge of Allan an incompetant salesman from npower came round and tried to get me to buy electricity from them, unlike this women he didn’t lie he said he didn’t “actually know how the supplyer thing works”, he had a list of prices so I could see what I would be paying if I changed and he had an interesting product (wind power only, I’m into those sorts of things) so he got his commission. Scottish Power’s website looks like it does work with something other than IE now but there’s no way I’m changing my supplyer to one which will lie to me.

A few weeks ago I went to the Scottish Hobo Society, a fun night at the Bongo Club, Edinburgh’s non-commercial nightclub. Best band of the night was the Revelator Band. Screaming, stomping gothic voodoo blues. They knew how to put on a show and play cool music.

I’ve also been to a couple of swing dancing nights, regular Tuesday events at the Bongo Club. Swing is pretty much the sort of partner dancing that you do naturally when you’re not trying to do any paticular style of dancing. Those clever Americans turned it into a style of dancing which looks easy and is easy until you actually starting learning it.

There’s still quite a lot of the Bible after Jesus dies. His apostles go out and start spreading what becomes christianity to anyone who will listen. This mostly means non-Jews. A lot of it is long and boring and involves explaining what Jesus ment. Sometimes it gets a bit nasty as someone gets thrown in jail or tortured to death. One of the apostles gets thrown in jail and manages to protest all the way to up Caesar but the version I was reading never covered any actual trial with Caesar which is a shame. One day an apostle is wandering along when Jesus starts talking in the sky and starts showing him heaven, hell and the apocalyps. Heaven is very well lit and has lots of thrones and lots of angelic types worshiping around god all day every day. He has a pet sheep there for some reason. There’s an apocalypse with horsemen and everything, it’s all a bit Terry Pratchett. The bible ends with a warning that anyone who adds or removes anything from it will be burned in hell, which probably expains why the abreviated version I was reading is written anonymously.

I read Harry Potter after that, it was much more exciting.

In my quest to read through an abridged version of the Bible in time for the World Gathering of Young Friends I’ve finished the first testament and got a good chunk through the second. The first ends when the Israelis get allowed back to Jerusalem by the Babylonians and they rebuild it and the temple and all live happily ever after.

Then one day a woman who never had a child and who’s husband is a distant grandchild of King David gets visited by some angels and gets told that she will have a child who turns out to be Jon the Baptist who is later revealed to be Elijah, some profit dude. A few months after Jon is born he gets a cousin by a woman called Mary. Mary, Joseph and Jesus have to run away to Egypt to not get killed by Herod. When Herod dies they come back and live a perfectly normal life until Jesus turns 30 and starts going around preaching to the masses and doing miracles. He does lots and lots of miracles and starts claiming to be the messiah which means he ought to bring peace on earth. But he fails to do this. Understandably this annoys the religious leaders somewhat, if you’re going to be the messiah at least do the job properly and actually bring peace on earth. So they plot to kill him, which seems like a bit of a drastic reaction. When Jesus arrives in Jerusalem the crowds welcome him with palms and cheering but later when Pontious Pilot asks the crowd who they want to kill they all want Jesus killed, it’s not clear at all what makes the change. He gets tortured to death and put in a cave but then comes back to life and starts talking to people again most of whom don’t recognise him. Jesus is a definite improvement over the old testament god with his new improved love your neighbour and enemy attitude but I find the “just believe I’m the messiah or you’re all sinners” attitude a bit unfair, people demand proof and quite right too. Since he doesn’t live up to the description of the messiah and doesn’t bring peace on earth there’s no reason to believe him and call him christ.

Kings is a long and boring part of the Bible. It starts with David who seems to disobey pretty much every commandment this is (murdering Goliath, lots of adultery, suggestions of a homosexual relationship too which is quite refreshing) yet ends up being considered a wise King. Then there is a long line of kings none of whom are very interesting. Some a good because they believe in god which means god helps them kill all their enemies, most are bad and worship other gods/idols which means they get beaten by all their enemies. There’s one recognisable story when a profit called Jonah is sent by god to tell the King at the time that he’s not being respectful enough and is about to be thrashed by some Philistines. Jonah gets scared and runs away to sea but god sends a storm and the sailors throw him overboard to stop the storm and Jonah gets eaten by a fish. Jonah prays a lot and god lets him out so he delivers the message to the King who them throws him in jail. Not sure what the message is in that.

Eventually they all forget to worship god and everyone gets captured by King Nebucanezzer of the Babylonians. He’s cool because it’s named after Morpheous’s ship in The Matrix. Some of the Israelies get high up positions in Nebucanezzer’s government because they worship god and It helps them advise the King. Daniel is one of these and the other advisers of the King get jelous and get him thrown to the lions to be eaten, only they don’t eat him because he worships god and Nebucanezzer throws the advisers to the lions instead, they all get eaten.

There’s a mention of a saviour who will be sent by god and bring peace on earth, which I suspect is leading into a sequel.

In this book Joshua led the invation by the Israelies of the land called Canaan which is now Israel and Palestine. He did a nifty trick of circling the city of Jericho for 7 days then blowing some horns and the city walls fell murdering everyone in them. He succeeds in taking over the whole place. Eventually he dies and a generation later all the Israelies forget about him and start worshiping other gods. God god gets jelous and lets other nations start invading the Israelies until they have to start worshiping God god again and he helps them kill all the invaders. This happens several times, apparantly the memory of these people is only one generation long. Samson is probably the most famous of the leaders during the strange phase. He gets his super powers from his hair and stupidly tells his wife that who then tells the invading philistines who chop it all off. Then he kills them all by collapsing a temple on them. Charming.

One day the Israelies are really distrustful of God god and they decide they need a King, so God god gives them a King who was called Saul. Saul gets superhero powers and goes around causing genocide on anyone who isn’t Israelie. Except that during one genocide he decides to spare some sheep and causing God to get mad and take away his superhero powers and make some dude called David King instead.

This is as close as I could get to the castle espianade where Joanne was reading from the new Harry Potter. 90 children got to use the Tatoo stands to watch her read with nifty lighting and fire on the castle. Everyone else only got this view.

This is the start of the queue at Waterstons on Princes Street.

And several hundred metres away this is the end.

I need a tripod.

After Genisis (the book where God decides to drown the entire population of the planet except for one family) things turn a bit nasty as God gets dictatorial (lots of commandments, and “cursed is he who..”), homophobic (I checked that up, the book I’m reading puts that sentence in suspiciously stronger language than the King James Bible) and racist with his “chosen people” who march around the Middle East waging war against nations ansd taking over the riches of other’s land. Suspiciously similar to current day politics infact.

Moved to a new flat in Polwarth so I’m looking for a flatmate now.

Just took order of a muckle Suma order, every self respecting modern hippy buys their food in bulk from Suma, the wholesales people for all the health food shops. Probably the cheapest way to buy organic food. They have a curious attitude to potential customers, if you live near a health food shop they won’t give you an account. Of course you can always get away with using someone else’s account if you know it. I’m not sure what possessed me to buy 5kg of apples but it’ll be interesting finding things to do with them.

I’ve ordered a fortnightly fruit and veg box from Grow Wild to further reduce my need to ever leave the flat. Quite disappointed, you don’t get much for your 10 quid, there’s no tatties and none of the produce seems to be paticularly local. We were getting much more from East Coast Organics but they have an even worse website.

Today I started reading a book called The Story which is a readable version of the bible. This is preparation for the World Gathering of Young Friends where there will be lots of Christian types so I thought I should catch up on the whole idea a bit like having to read Lord of the Rings before the films came out. It starts of with sexism (man is incharge of woman), has crazy continuity errors (how did Cain marry when there was nobody else around?) and then there’s incest with lots of marrying close family members. God seems to be just about the most cruel creator you could imagine, as soon as people start achieveing anything he punishes them so Adam and Eve got kicked out their garden for being inquisitive and the people got split up into speaking different languages because they were achieving too much (Tower of Babel etc) as one group. There’s this guy called Job who gets his farm slaughtered, family killed and given a nasty plauge just because God wanted to see if Job would still worship him. And that’s just Gensis. Sounds like just the sort of God I wouldn’t want to worship. I believe he gets a makeover in part 2 but that’s still a long way off.

Everyone in this country is familiar with Ceilidh dancing. What makes Ceilidh dancing good is that you can learn a dance in 5 minutes. None of the moves are very subtle and everything is coreographed so you get told where to step and when.

By contrast Salsa dancing is freeform which means you have to decide what to do and you keep bumping into people. Salsa has 3 or 4 basic steps which all involve stepping off and onto a central point, you always rest on the fourth beat. The leader (male) has to give hand signals to the follower (female) on what the next step will be. That’s tricky, especially when you’ve been taught by different teachers with different ideas of which hand signals means what.

The Edinburgh Tango Society do free beginners classes on Sundays. Tango is even more subtle than Salsa. There are only 3 basic steps: back, foward and sideways. Generally the leader only does forwards and the follower only backwards. It’s very easy to bump into people if they arn’t going fast enough. You have to be graceful too, whereas in Ceilidh and Salsa you’re ment to bop around lots, in Tango you have to keep your head steady when walking around. You signal with your body which means the follower has to spend their time staring at the torso of the leader.

Suggestions for other interesting styles of dance to learn welcome.

When I was in Australia I found two screwdrivers in my hand luggage that I had completely failed to remember were in there when I packaged and carefully took my swiss army card out of my wallet and swiss army knife out of my bag. Then on the way back at Heathrow the man discovered after much searching my old swiss army card that I though I had lost ages ago. It would have gone through scanners at Edinburgh, Healthrow and Sydney before they found it. Oops.

Sydney is nice. It’s nice how people drive on the correct side of the road even if they have silly power socket designs. The opera house is nice too as is the bridge in the middle of the city. And it’s fun seeing sky scrapers for the first time I can remember in my life. The surf and beaches are nice and the ferries are really nice. Being able to take a random late night ferry and sleep out under the stars on a beach is really nice. Then there is the national park, real forrest for as far as the eye can see, we rented a canadian canoe and went paddling into the jungle.

But it’s not for me. The sun is nice but there is a hole in the ozone layer there and everyone has to go for checkups every 6 months and get their skin cancers burned off. You would think this would make them environmentally concious but no they all drive 4×4 cars and don’t bother to sign the Kyoto treaty. The city is based around what’s called a CFD, central financial district, how very cultureless. And the opera house and harbour bridge are about the only interesting bits of architecture in the country. The city is huge, bigger than London, because everyone lives in wooden flat packed suburban homes with large gardens. That’s all very luxurious but it does take about an hour to get from most homes to the city centre (that’s the CFD to them) and you can’t walk to the corner shop to get a litre of milk. Then there are the people who buy houses just to knock them down and build new ones because the existing one is a bit shabby, talk about wastefulness. So nice, but no my thing.

Got my first fan mail today. “How do you manage to fit in a living and find time to commit to free software projects? Do you only sleep 5 hours a night or something?” Well I started by going to a university with a stupidly easy course, then I made free software my dissertation project so I could work on it, then I worked freelance and if I can earn 100 pounds a day and only need about 500 pounds a month to live off that leaves a good three weeks every month for playing around with free software. Easy.

Today I flew for 24 hours from Edinburgh down the west coast of Britain (no idea why but that’s what the wee TV screen showed) to London. At Heathrow I had to run across the terminal to get a bus to terminal 4 then run to the gate where they said “take a seat please Mr Riddell” and kept me waiting for 10 minutes while they decided if I would be allowed on with the improper ticket Edinburgh Airport had given me. Fortunately they did and I flew across Europe and central Asia, India then down Malaysia into Singapore Airport which is well conditioned for the 15 minute stop I got to make. Then over the beautiful seas and rainforests of Indonesia and on to the desert of Australia which is about the biggest thing I’ve ever seen and goes on for hours and hours with a really picture perfect sun set.

Inflight films: Leminy Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate events, very good light entertainment; Hotel Rwanda, should be required viewing for the whole planet.

Gnarly surf at St Andrews the other day as we did a risk assesment on these boogy boards and the open canoe-kayaks on top of the trailer. It confirmed my belief that board surfing is far too much like hard work to achieve very little while canoe surfing is the best fun you can have this side of cabogganing.

Recently I’ve gone to some lectures. Two were part of the excellent Edinburgh Lectures series. High quality free public lectures are a sign of a first rate cultural and intellectual environment so I consider it my duty to go to them.

The first was from Kim Winser who runs Pringle the borders knitwear company (Pringle invented and trademarked the term knitware a century ago). She has done a very impressive job of turning Pringle from a tacky golf clothes company into a leading fashion and luxury brand worn by a-class stars and appearing on the cat walk in London and Milan. Its an impressive business feat but I found the industry very sad, their use of stick thin models and the way marketing is so much more important than products is very depressing.

The other Edinburgh Lecture was from Stuart Cosgrove “Head of Nations and Regions, Channel 4” the job that should be called “fulfilling the licence requirement to have 30% of programmes made outside London”, which is a tragicly low number. He argued that Scotland is a vibrant and successful country stuck with a cultural attitude towards poverty and industrialism. Almost any film and TV to have come out of Scotland is based on schemies and criminals. Our media should celebrate the great achievements and history we have not the declined industry of the 20th century. Which is a fair point. Someone called Patricia Ferguson gave the closing thanks, apparently she is minister for culture or something.

The other lecture I went to was a computing science MSc presentation of a paper on hierarchical sorting. Two students presented the paper not very well and summed up saying that it was a useful paper. Except it wasn’t and I said as much, sorting by hierarchies is rarely any use, look at Yahoo or how easy it is to loose files on your hard disk. The course organising lecturer agreed with me. So here were these intelligent post-graduate people who had chosen to do this course persumably because they were so interested in the subject they wanted more of it after their first degree and yet they still can’t think for themselves. You would be better off going to a real conference like FOSDEM this weekend where people care and know about the subject matter than doing a university course. We scarpered quickly at the end before anyone realised we weren’t actually students at all.

In other new my favourite musician Martyn Bannett has died, his music is great.

Me and some Friends were eating toasted crumpets and drinking tea at the top of Arthurs Seat last week when up popped this young lad or lass (the helmet made it hard to know which) carrying a bike who then cycled all the way down the steepest face. That’s extreame cycling.

The last part of my notes from The Scottish Enlightenment

Africa was the final continent to be explored and colonised by Europeans. Malaria was the main reason why it was impossible to discover its hidden depths. Journeys up the Congo usually ended in death for most of the crew. David Livingstone was a mill worker from Strathclyde who was part of a mid-19th century religious revival in Scotland. In 1840 he went to the British colony of Cape Town to join a missionary 600 miles north in the Kalahari desert but discovered it had only found some 40 converts. The next year he travelled to any remote village he could find, learning the local languages and culture. He was the first to use a drug called quinine which kept him from malaria but not from a lion attack which stopped the use of his right arm. By 1856 he had become the first European to cross Africa and discovered that its interior had a rich rainforest, not the desert which had been supposed. He returned to Britain a hero. He made two later trips to Africa and, as had happened in India, tried to promote an attitude of imperialism for civilisation. He was strongly against the slave trade which Britain had abolished but continued with Arabs buying and selling Africans. On a trip to Egypt he went missing for two years until found by an investigative journalist who discovered him sick in a remote village. His body was brought back to Europe and buried in Westminster Abbey.

Towards the end of the 19th century the rest of the western world had caught up with Scotland’s education system. Scotlands aristocrats now had an attitude of being British and Scotland’s culture became more of a self-parody. The Edinburgh Review and similar journals died and instead publishing innovation came from tabloids, Alfred Harmsworth set up the Daily Mirror in 1896 which was followed by many imitators. Scottish industry has had successes including the Singer Sewing machine factory in Glasgow, the biggest in the world in its time. A rise in serious Scottish Nationalism politics was caused by an increase in poverty and the view that British governments were working against the interests of Scotland which led to the rise of the SNP as a serious political force and eventually devolution. Devolution was first proposed by the Liberal government of William Gladstone in 1885 but it failed in Ireland due to religious divide and after the fall of the Liberals the idea was not taken up by the new Labour party which could not afford to loose Scotland. It came eventually but how well that fares is yet to be seen.

The second last part of my notes from The Scottish Enlightenment

Scots had been among the first to colonise Canada through Nova Scotia. Orcadians particularly were successful in the fur trade, they were able to suffer the cold of Canada. Alexander MacKenzie became the first person to cross North America in 1789 by following what became the MacKenzie river 3,000 miles to the pacific. Canada was united and brought to independence by Glaswegian John MacDonald, by negotiating independence with the British government he realised that given a choice Canada would rather remain loyal than completely separate. Sandford Fleming from Kircaldy was the Canadian governments chief engineer and finished the first railway across the country. In the 19th century time was measured from sun rise to sun set which ment it differed wherever you were, this did not matter in the days of horse travel but it ment chaos for railway timetabled. He divided the earth into segments each with their own time zone but not differing between, this was standardised in 1882 in a conference held in Washington and the on 17 November 1883 clocks around the world were set to the same standard for the first time.

Scots also had a large part in Australia. It was largely forgetted by the British until William Pitt decided to use it as a penal colony sending 160,000 convicts there. They were treated as slaves by the free colonists until sheep farmer John MacArthur was imprisoned by the governor and in revenge had the governor kidnapped and sent back to England. MacAurthur ran a militia rule for two years until the arrival of governor Lachlan Macquarie who brought order by treating the convicts with respect. He got them to clean up build roads and buildings in Sydney which was made of a dirt road and tents for buildings.

Many Scots emigrated to the US. In 1848 immigrant James Wilson Marshall discovered a piece of gold in California creating the gold rush and the first get rich quick hopes of the Americans. Scottish born shipbuilders created boats that could sail round the Americas to California in less than 90 days, a record until the age of trains. Samuel Morse, a Scottish ancestor, developed a system for sending signals along wires and his famous Morse code and in 10 years had covered the US in telegraph wires. These were later used for Alexander Graham Bell’s harmonic telegraph or telephone which was patented just two hours before his rival filed a patent application. Bell fought further rival patents but soon managed to become a monopoly and a millionaire. However the most successful Scottish-American businessman was Andrew Carneggie who invested in George Pullmans railway carrages to earn $400,000. He next invested in steel which he saw was about to become incredibly important in construction and through innovative production techniques his company was soon producing an amount equal to half entire British the output and discovered the principle of economies of scale. After a strike where 9 men were killed in riots he sold the company gaining $300 million, a fantastic sum in the days before income tax. He spent his money on public buildings including 2,800 libraries and 7,689 church organs.

Part six of my notes from The Scottish Enlightenment

Scots played a huge part in the shaping of the British Empire. The first part of the history of the British empire died when the trade monopoly over the Atlantic was stopped by the American revolution. The second was shaped by the ideas of Charles Pasley from Eskdalemuir in Dumfriesshire. He wrote An Essay on the Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire which changed how Britons thought their empire should relate to the rest of the world. Britain would need to fight to gain its empire and by using the colonies as a resource for soldiers and sailors it grew by an average of 100,000 square miles per year between the Battle of Waterloo and the American Civil War. One reason for the success of the Scots in the new Empire was their world leading education system, even the poorer had impressive skills.

The Black Watch, with its distinctive blue and green tartan was started by the local Stuart clans to patrol the Highlands after the Jacobite rising to put down the remaining rebels. By 1815 there were 86 Highland regiments and were a backbone to the British army. They had included many who had previously fought for the Jacobites. Military innovation included a breech loaded rifle that could fire twice as fast as the muzzle loaded models and the percussion lock which used poattium chlorate instead of flint to fire and could shoot in any weather.

In 1806 the monopoly East India Company commissioned Scotsman James Mill to write a history of the British colonisation of India. The History of British India was the first attempt to apply the four-stage theory of civilisation to a non-western culture. He concluded that Britain should colonise India to civilise it with good government. This was done largely under Scottish leaders, the followers of Edinburgh-educated governor general Lord Minto. They negotiated and fought for peace with the Sikhs, Persians and between Muslims and Hindus. James Dalhousie (Lord Ramsey) was governor-general from 1848 for 8 years and create railways and national telegraph and postal services. He increased schools and irrigation projects and pushed for woman’s rights in a country where they had none. His changes caused a revolution which lasted for two years and was put down by two Scottish generals Colin Campbell and Hugh Rose, destroying any last rules from natives. Scots were skillful merchants in India and created a smuggling trade with China of opium. The Opium wars were so successful that the Chinese had to sign a treaty to legalise that and other trade in 1842 which included the founding of a colony there, Hong Kong.