Another Brick in the Wall

Some of you might have noticed the wall in yesterday's photograph. Well, that's part of the York city wall. These walls extend for several miles around the centre of the city, and it's possible to walk around on the top of them - at least before they shut them at sundown. Though "sundown" is a fairly abstract concept when the sky is so filled with clouds that you can't actually see the sun, so at times it might be more guesswork than anything else.

While they don't completely surround the city centre like in the Chinese city Xi'an and you can't ride a bike around them, they do pre-date those walls by about 500 years, having being built some time around 71 AD. This is the one really weird thing about the UK. Everything is old. Historic. It's not like Australia where something is historic if it's been around for a hundred years or so. Heck, by those standards, there's probably some moldy bread lying on a street that's historic. But I digress, and I could most likely write a whole post about that, so there's no point in wasting good blogging material. So, back to the walls.

Well, it's obvious that the thing have been here for a while, because if you walk on the edge, a loose stone here and there reminds you that you're perhaps not doing the safest thing in the world. Perhaps the most interesting thing is that the ground level at points has risen so much that the walls would be unlikely to keep out anything at all. In fact, they could probably be breached by a slightly aggressive squirrel whose nuts have been stolen. Hmmm, squirrel sappers. Now there's an idea.

Life in the Bike Lane

Apologies for not having updated this in a while, but I've been fairly busy. I thought I was overdue for me to give a bit of information about where I am. I'm living in York, which is an interesting little city. So far, the English weather has proven to be as fickle as a four year old's temper, and the Crowded House song "Four Seasons in One Day" isn't even close. Four seasons in one hour would probably be closer to the mark.

But the thing I'm posting about today is how York is so amazingly accommodating to cyclists. Coming from Canberra, which is supposedly a cyclist friendly city (although sometimes some car drivers seem to forget that), York wins unequivocally in providing for cyclists.

Not only do cyclists get bike paths on the side of the road, but cars actually give way to them instead of treating them as a mobile speed hump that gives them points in some kind of real-life Grand Theft Auto game.

However, the really unique thing is that cyclists get their own traffic lights. Yes, there's bicycle lights that go green when cyclists get their turn to go while all the cars are stopped for them to go through.

In some intersections, there's even little "bike-only" areas right at the front of the intersection, so the cyclists get to ride past all the stationary cars at the red traffic lights to their little buffer zone. Then, before all the cars get to go, the cyclists get a few seconds to get moving and through the intersection and get back in their bike line before the red lights disappear completely and allow the cars to move as well.

Of course, there has to be some drawback to all this cyclist generosity. And there is, but it's a fairly simply one. If you ride on the pedestrian footpath, you're liable to be hit with a 30 pound fine.

We Can Cook It For You Wholesale

I think a great many people can thank the United Kingdom for fame of Spam, via the comedic genius of Monty Python, even though it comes from the US. (As a side note, that US website scared me.)

But it seems that the idea of food-in-a-can was popular in the United Kingdom is there's an abundance of pre-prepared foodstuffs. If you so desired, you could live entirely off a diet of food that you simply remove from its packaging (and sometimes you don't even have to do that) put in the microwave/oven/saucepan and cook for the correct amount of time. This point was hammered home when I found that there are two supermarkets that are a stone's throw (and I do mean that literally) from where I live, both of which stock inordinate amounts of prepackaged food.

I do wonder how a country that produces so many famous TV personality chefs can subsequently have such an unending supply of instant-food.

But, I'm in no position to get on a nutritional soapbox, as a large portion of my diet since arriving in the UK has consisted of the aforementioned insta-meals and sandwiches. Somewhere, a nutritionist is crying, and doesn't know why.

Regional Newspapers

In Tasmania, I've been exposed to the joy that is a regional newspaper. The guilty party in question for today's disgrace is a publication known as "The Examiner", known more commonly among locals by the endearing term "The Exaggerator".

At least half the paper is dominated by a mixture of sport (the majority of which is AFL - Australian Football League, for those who don't know) and local news like car parking or someone's pet dog barking and rescuing the neighbours from a house fire. No, this is not a joke.

The "World News" section is typically one or two pages, at least half of which is occupied by an advertisement for a local or national company. While this is bad enough, many of the stories are the sort of "light-hearted" stories one might find in the "oddity" section of any other media, focussing on escaped animals or strange occurrences rather than meaty issues such as ongoing conflicts, a world financial crisis, or international politics.

Today's glaring offence was in regards to the dreadful bombing of the Marriot Hotel in Pakistan.. While this event was given an entire two page spread (minus the ridiculously large advertisements, of course) the reporting was still terrible. After a brief discussion of the event, one article changed its focus completely, instead devoting a not insigificant percentage of its allotted space to start reporting on the tragedy's relevance... to cricket. Apparently the concern over the effect that this will have on cricket in Pakistan and what now seems like a prudent decision to not tour in the country is far greater than the concern over the loss of life that has occurred.

Oh, woe is me.

Sony 1 - Winamp 0

My inaugural blog post is dedicated to something that happened not too long ago. I was fortunate enough to receive a Sony NWZ-A726 Walkman for my birthday from some very good friends. They were smart enough to know that a portable MP3 player was something that I would cherish, particularly if it wasn't one of those accursed iPods.

An amusing fact is that for quite some time, all Australian airlines classifed all such devices as iPods in their "please turn off all electronic devices" speech, rather than learning that the iPod was a specific instance of a greater class of devices. And yes, the usage of the the word "greater" there was deliberate, as the iPod is a somewhat over-priced, underfeatured and "locked-in" solution. I do not want to be forced to use iTunes (and all associated "bonus features" that get installed without my consultation) or some hacked up iPod manager software to get music on to my MP3 player.


Enter the Sony NWZ-A726. Sure, Sony have been known for some rather poor practices in the past as well, but rather than harping on about previous cases of extremely bad judgement, let's focus on something awesome. Or rather, two things. 1. Drag and Drop. 2. Format support. Sony recently came to the realisation that people just want to be able to plug in a MP3 player and dump their music directly on it without having to use some proprietary software or format. Bravo!

This alone makes it a winner in my book, but even aside from that, it's a really nice MP3 player with good sound quality and excellent earbuds. For once, the things don't try to tear your cartilage apart for the entirety of the time that you're attempting to listen to your music. All I can say is: about freaking time.

Of course, as any Olympic opening ceremony can prove, nothing goes off without a hitch, and my aggravation came in the simple form of plugging the thing into my computer. Doing so abruptly stopped the music that was playing on my PC. Confused, I looked at my screen to find the Winamp (my PC MP3 player of choice) had crashed. Attempting to start it up again resulted in the same abrupt crash.

Unplug MP3 player.
Start Winamp... Winamp starts.
Plug in MP3 player... Winamp dies.

After a few hours of frustration and intermittent swearing, emails and forum posts, I managed to track down the issue to not Sony, but Winamp. A poorly coded dll (pmp_4s.dll) tries to access the portable upon it being plugged in. Since Windows is already trying to talk to the device, Winamp apparently does something "naughty" (great technical term, huh?) when it tries to talk to it, causing Windows to kill Winamp in a rather authoritarian manner, proving once again that - Windows: it doesn't play nice with the other children.

So the solution was to tell Winamp not to try and do more things than it should. Which to be honest, should be a very short list, as I don't really need an MP3 to burn CDs, download album art, set up a sharing network to allow others to remotely access my music collection, be the exclusive tool allowable to upload content to my MP3 player... Sorry, I'd gotten off that high horse several paragraphs ago.

My ideal PC MP3 player does the following:
Plays MP3s.

The End.