Seamus K - Irish tech industry expat living in Sweden.
This evening’s entertainment. Thanks to @CERuge for the design. If you like it you can support it on the Lego ideas site so it may become an official model in the future.
Or you can do like I did and spend about €20 to order all the parts direct from Lego and make it yourself 🙂
In the run up to the Austrian presidential election the Economist ran an article on the country. Despite living there for about 4 years, much of it was news to me (Austrians really don’t mix with foreigners).
This quote did send a shiver down my spine:
“Under Austria’s Proporz system, jobs, housing and business licences were doled out on the basis of party membership. Laws are written by party-affiliated labour or business groups and handed to parliament to rubber-stamp. Even now two motoring associations and two mountain-trekking clubs exist, to ensure that Austrians need never dally with another political tribe when their cars break down or when on an Alpine stroll.”
Dear God, in the time I was there, I could have unwittingly been a member of the Fianna Fail Hiking Club!
I have put up a permanent page to track the extremes of location and conditions I have experienced across the world. Feel free to compare with yours!
About once a month I post a blog post for work*. This week I had one posted on cloud business models. You can read the post if you want. It has been moderately successful, gaining views and conversions.
Personally I am chuffed though that I managed to get them to include a photo of Churchill as part of the post. Who would have thought we could get a perspective from the man in Cloud Computing?
I’ll have to see what I can manage for the next one. I do take requests as well. Stick something in the comments if you have an idea.
* The demands of writing for work are part of the reason why I can be erratic posting here.
James Cameron has announced a 5th Avatar film in a desperate attempt to get somebody, somewhere to care about any of them.
Avatar may have been the highest grossing film ever (until you adjust for inflation, and then it falls to #15), but no one feels deeply for it. I am no fan of Star Wars, but I’ll concede it has millions of fans who love every aspect of it. They dress up as the characters, they speculate endlessly about the next installments, and they buy bucket loads of merchandise.
Does anyone buy anything related to Avatar, other than porn parodies?
* Funny that he is adding sequels, when he has yet to even make a second one.
In Stockholm’s Gamla Stan today I finally managed to track down the Axel Oxenstierna palace. Unless you are a history geek (like me) you wouldn’t know he was “Lord High Chancellor” of Sweden in the 1600s. With King Gustavus Adolphus he led Sweden into the 30 years war. Without their intervention it probably would only have been the 12 years war.
I have been looking for the house for a while. In amongst the old narrow twisting streets of the old town it was difficult to find, and surprisingly hard to to find the actual address. Some googling last night eventually gave me the address. And as I was in town yesterday I had to get there.
I love finding places like this. Small connections to the past, that are just a little obscure. And it is always more fun to go out specifically to find something with a particular link, than to just read about it on a plaque as you are passing by chance.
I don’t care that WhatsApp is now encrypted end to end. I am not going to start using it. I will stick with my usual communication channels of phone call, SMS, email (3 accounts), Telegram, G+ hangouts, Apple Facetime, Microsoft Lync, Slack, Voxer, Snapchat, Tinder, Twitter, and LinkedIn, and nothing else!
I have been humming and hawing for a while about VR headset. I am excited by the technology and I have played around with it at work (2nd gen Oculus) and at CES (3rd Gen). Hey I had even played around with one of the original arcade VR systems back in the 1990s when they first came out.
The problem has been deciding which headset to go for – Oculus Rift or a HTC Vive. The descriptions of the capabilities of the Vive do seem better – full room scale VR, and it will ship with proper controllers. Though there haven’t been proper head to head comparisons yet but they will come.
The reality though is that the Oculus Rift has already lost this battle, and has a serious credibility problem. Less than a month from the launch date, they have amassed three pretty major strikes against themselves*:
The race for the VR business is just beginning, and already Oculus are coming across as shifty and a laggard compared to the competition. Much of this may be because – Oculus is backed by the deep pockets of Facebook, but neither has ever shipped hardware before. HTC for all its troubles in the handset business is experienced at this.
In the next year or two we may see the market discussion go the way of the console wars where Playstation and XBox sales figures are compared every quarter. But just as the PS4 soundly thrashed the XBox One in terms of sales, I think the same is in store for the Oculus – despite the price difference.
Once I have sold the kidney to pay for it, I know which one I will certainly be getting.
* And now Eve Valkyrie, which was a launch exclusive title for the Rift will be available for the Vive later this year. That was something of a killer app for me. Now it is coming to the competition that’s game set and match to the Vive.
There needs to a a word (something we can borrow from German perhaps) that describes that perfect moment when you are commuting to work by car, channel hopping the radio stations trying to find something that is not inane presenter chatter, ads, jingles, or music you hate, when you arrive on a station just as a brilliant song you haven’t heard in ages starts and you get to listen to the whole thing uninterrupted from end to end, so a smile arrives on your face for the rest of your journey. Maybe Pendelnmusikspürsinn or something.
I had such a Pendelnmusikspürsinn moment on the way to work this morning. The song was John Cale’s version of Hallelujah. This is the one that turned Leonard Cohen’s otherwise unremarkable song into the something amazing. In recent years it has been covered repeatedly, especially as a sort of religions anthem. Which is amusing as when you actually listen to the lyrics you realise it is filthy. The original versions are all about sex:
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew youShe tied you to a kitchen chair..
..And from your lips she drew the Hallelujah
or how about this verse:
There was a time when you let me know
What’s really going on below
But now you never show that to me, do ya?
followed by:
But remember when I moved in you
And the holy dove was moving too
And every breath we drew was Hallelujah
To be fair Cohen wrote over 80 verses, and many have biblical references. So it is possible to put together a version that looks religious. But Cohen himself has said the song is about love and ecstasy. And that is far more fun for the drive to work.
There is a joke about vegans that goes – “How do you know if someone is a vegan? Don’t worry they’ll tell you”.
Is it true?
Well at on my hike last weekend I offered to take the group photo. It gives me a great excuse not to be in it. I had the camera, a real one, and not a smart phone, and I said “say cheese”. From the group I got a chorus of “cheese” and one “but I am a vegan”.
I can confirm the guy was a vegan, as he could be heard during much of the day going on at length about his vegan-ism from the other end of the hike.
No wonder some of them get a reputation for being humourless bores.
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