I still remember this, though a little vaguely. My parents, sister and I were staying in a rented apartment in Guernsey (Channel Islands). While the actual moon landing happened in the middle of the night when my sister and I were asleep, I remember going to my parents room early in the morning to watch a rerun broadcast. Now that was in a time when there was no morning television in the UK. The BBC had made special arrangements for the studios and transmitters to be running when they would normally be closed down. We saw these grainy pictures on a tiny television, but even then as children we knew this was special.

I had been an Apollo nut for a while when it happened. My bedroom was plastered with photos of the Apollo 8 mission (which I knew inside out at seven years old), collected from a promotion by a breakfast cereal company. My friends and I saw the dream and the vision of man going to the stars. The magic year of 2000 seemed so far away, but we knew that by then men would be living in space and under the sea.

The BBC coverage of Apollo was amazing. We had Patrick Moore and James Burke there to explain it all to us, with models and cartoon illustrations, and diagrams to show the progress of each stage of each mission. And the theme tune from Also Sprache Zarathustra, if an accidental choice for “2001: A Space Odyssey”, just captured the moment perfectly.

But soon the gleam came off. A few months later in 1969, my Meadgate schoolfriends were asked to suggest a new name for one of our school “houses” (that very British concept), and “Armstrong” won hands down in the voting. Then we were told by the teachers that the name assigned would actually be “Marconi”, because Neil Armstrong was only one small part of the huge NASA program. We were gutted – Neil was our hero and who we all wanted to be. So much for democracy.

Apollo 13 held us all spellbound. Moon missions had started to seem routine. Now we all saw just how dangerous it was. Truly that was NASA’s finest hour.

Apollo 15 took the moon rover out onto the surface, and we started to see some real exploration and science going on. This was beyond the pure politics of the first missions, which did relatively little science compared to the later ones.

When we learned that Apollo 17 would be the last, it came as a shock and a disappointment.

We had Skylab, and the joint Apollo-Soyuz mission, but it was clear these were just there to use up the remaining Saturn V launchers rather than to do anything really useful. We knew the Shuttle was coming, and with that there would be space stations, and the construction of ships in space for longer missions.

But the Shuttle turned out to be a damp squib, unable to reach geosynchronous orbit. Hubble and SpaceLab missions opened our eyes to new things, though limited by the limitations of the Shuttle. The various unmanned probes caused some excitement.

Will we ever get there? I don’t know but I’m not greatly optimistic. There will always be short term crisis that some people will say needs the money more. I think that’s very lacking in vision, but it’s an easy target.

Would Apollo have happened under different circumstances? Probably we needed the Cold War and, yes, even the Kennedy Assassination to make it happen. If Kennedy had lived, would Congress have continued to fund the project in tough times? Or was it that nobody was prepared to speak against the words of a Blessed Martyr President? Well thank God for Kennedy in any case. And thank God for LBJ too, who did all the donkey work before Nixon came in to steal the credit for an achievement that was mostly done by the time he arrived.

40 years later, the bright lights of Apollo have dimmed an awful lot. Kids don’t want to be engineers because it’s too hard compared to “media studies”. Science went in a different direction for anybody’s expectations. Instead of rocketry and stardrives we got software and harddrives.

But even in a world of HDTV, IPTV and Broadband Internet, nobody today can bring us a live television picture from the moon.

40 years ago there were two superpowers striving to take mankind into space. The USSR came extremely close to matching Apollo, and on a much smaller budget. Now perhaps we’ll see a new space power emerge, such as China or India. I’ll be cheering them on. Racing to the far horizons is a much better thing than racing to build H-bombs. And if the “developing” nations start to make today’s not-so-superpowers feel nervous and left behind, perhaps the West will again turn eyes to the heavens.

So raise a glass to Neil and Buzz. Forty years ago, they rode on the tip of the spear of human endeavour. Lets hope we still have such men in 40 years time, and the guts to send them on their way.

(Not original – this is circulating the Internet in email. I don’t know the original source)

London Times

An Obituary printed in the London Times.......... Interesting and sadly true.
'Today we mourn the passing of a beloved old friend, Common Sense, who has been with us for many years. No one knows for sure how old he was, since his birth records were long ago lost in bureaucratic red tape.

He will be remembered as having cultivated such valuable lessons as:

• Knowing when to come in out of the rain;
• why the early bird gets the worm;
• Life isn't always fair;
• and maybe it was my fault.

Common Sense lived by simple, sound financial policies (don't spend more than you can earn) and reliable strategies (adults, not children, are in charge).

His health began to deteriorate rapidly when well-intentioned but overbearing regulations were set in place. Reports of a 6-year-old boy charged with sexual harassment for kissing a classmate; teens suspended from school for using mouth wash after lunch; and a teacher fired for reprimanding an unruly student, only worsened his condition.

Common Sense lost ground when parents attacked teachers for doing the job that they themselves had failed to do in disciplining their unruly children.

It declined even further when schools were required to get parental consent to administer sun lotion or an Aspirin to a student; but could not inform parents when a student became pregnant and wanted to have an abortion.

Common Sense lost the will to live as the churches became businesses; and criminals received better treatment than their victims. Common Sense took a beating when you couldn't defend yourself from a burglar in your own home and the burglar could sue you for assault.

Common Sense was preceded in death, by his parents, Truth and Trust, his wife, Discretion,  his daughter, Responsibility, his son, Reason.

He is survived by his 4 stepbrothers;  I Know My Rights; I Want It Now; Someone Else Is To Blame; I'm A Victim.

Not many attended his funeral because so few realized he was gone. If you still remember him, pass this on. If not, join the majority and do nothing.

I thought it would be interesting to see what the sky looked like on the night I was born. For years I've "known" I was born as a Cancer, my birthday being on July 8th.

Putting my birth date and approximate time into the Worldwide Telescope I can see clearly that the Sun was actually right in the middle of the constellation Gemini. Not on the edge between the two, but solidly in the middle of Gemini.

So what do the "classical" star signs mean? The answer can only be, nothing at all. If classical astrology is based on mystical associations between specific characteristics of celestial bodies, how can anyone be making valid associations if the underlying data us wrong???

Garbage in, garbage out.

Live at last, so all those people I've been telling to wait for this can finally try it out for themselves.

No matter how basic your knowledge of space and the stars and planets, this is still worth trying. You might be surprised how compelling it is, but then of course it has a whole universe of content to explore.

WorldWide Telescope

I've had discussions with a number of people about the new Fluid UI, also known as the Ribbon, that replaces the old menu structures in some of the Office 2007 applications (Word, Excel, and Powerpoint).

Some love it, some hate it. Some want to have the option to use the old menus and keyboard shortcuts, and sometimes get very upset when it is pointed out that this means they will NEVER change and be able to access the newer features.

Anyway, I guess at the root of all this is the question of Why it was changed, and this presentation does a good job of describing the reason Microsoft felt this change-pain was worth suffering.

Jensen Harris: An Office User Interface Blog : The Story of the Ribbon

With increasing numbers of people buying laptops instead of desktops, this has got to impact the PC gaming industry.

Laptops have traditionally had inferior graphics capability, not to mention general CPU and memory capability.

However the biggest problem has been the laggardly way in which many of the laptop manufacturers treat driver updates for laptops. Several times I've tried to find new drivers to squeeze some more performance, and then been bounced back and forth between chipset makers who refuse to publish drivers (go the laptop maker) and laptop makers who can't be bothered to keep their websites current with new drivers for older models.

Some of the current crop of online games such as Eve-Online and Second Life are starting to get grief or fail to run on my Acer Inspire 1800, which was a pricey high-power model a couple of years ago. If even high-end devices are treated as obsolete after such a short time, a higher population of laptops is going to make game designers think again about how far they can push the hardware.

But then, if that means they spend more effort on gameplay than on pretty gloss, I would count that a win.

OK, I'll bite. Is there a blogger out there that hasn't written about the lastest iGadget?

My initial reaction was Wow! The UI looks really cool, and I love the idea of a totally soft UI for a device (any device), so that new paradigms of user interaction become a real possibility.

But then reality set in.

1. Price. This thing costs more than a PS/3, and that's for a phone which usually has a much shorter life expectancy than a console. Just who is going to stump up so much for what is only really a status symbol?
2. Battery. I've not seen the Apple announcement that they have a radical improvement in battery technology in the works. That means this baby has to run on the same energy store as every other device of the same size. Now that fancy UI starts to look very power intensive. Remember, every CPU instruction consumes power. Every lighted pixel. Every moment of backlight. Every radio emmission. Every moment listening for a radio signal (or a voice command). The quoted battery life doesn't seem that good, and when was the last time you saw a retail device deliver on the battery life that the marketing guys promised??? So I expect this thing to go from office dock, to car dock, to home dock.
3. Fixed battery. So if it dies (as it will) you can't replace it without a lot of hassle. Modern Lithium Ion batteries are usually good for about 500 to 1000 complete power cycles.
4. Connectivity. No 3G means very slow service. I currently have 3G on my tablet (Swisscom Unlimited). However, the real concern is what it can connect to. If the email application only works with carrier email and voicemail, its useless for business. That means I wont carry it because I'm not going to carry two phones (or split my single contacts list) for anyone. I have all my numbers (about 1,500 of them) in Outlook/Exchange for my SmartPhone, and thats not going to change.
5. OS/X. I think they are being disingenuous implying that this things runs OS/X. I bet it is about as true as saying that the Xbox runs Windows 2000. Some kernel and a few APIs maybe, but the same OS it ain't.
6. Competition. This device is up against some stiff competition. As a converged device it is already in a niche, because many people (like me) will not feel the desire to leave a tablet or laptop at home and rely solely on a phone. And if I did feel such, I would then want the phone to run my business apps. A small tablet (mine is an HP TC1100) with a 3G card, along with a conventional Smartphone with my Outlook contacts, allows a much richer set of use cases than this converged device.
7. Heritage. Apple has not had a good track record with PDAs. I loved the Apple Newton (still have a 120 somewhere) and it had a lot of good ideas. But it died due to lack of Outlook sync while the Palm Pilot cleaned up the market despite having an inferior design. Hell, the Newton wouldnt even sync with Apple's own (Claris) desktop PIM. Office politics meant that Jobs hated the Newton project, so he probably wont want to bring in any of the goodness that it did have.

Unlike the iPod, the iPhone is trying to swim in an ocean already full of sharks. Not just phone makers but carriers, middleware vendors, and big fish like Nokia.

It looks really cool. It will be very well marketed. But I wont be spending my own money on one. Sorry.

Can't help thinking that those who argue that immigrants are taking jobs are missing the points. What this tells me is that the jobs are there to be had, and the long-term unemployed (those who are physically able to work at least) can't make the excuse that there are no jobs out there. Immigrants who are willing to work hard, and to pay their taxes and pension contributions, should be welcomed with open arms.

I would much rather every country had a full employment policy like Switzerland. "Can work, wont work" is not acceptable in any system of morality.

Link to BBC NEWS | Europe | Romanians put trust in hard work

A few weeks ago I logged into this blog as normal. Imagine my surprise to find that all my menus had shifted into German, a language I cannot read. Still stranger, my other PC continued to get the menus in English.

What is going on here?

Some ideas:

1. I live in Switzerland and usually connect from there. Was Live making a language guess based on my IP address location? But then both machines should get the same result shouldn't they?
2. Some hidden cookie in the browser? Deleted all of them, but not effect.
3. Page elements stuck in the cache? Deleted the cache contents, but no effect.
4. Something weird in Windows settings (I'm using Vista)? Well both PCs are set much the same. This one (with the error) is set for English with a US keyboard. The other (normal) is set for English with Swiss-German keyboard. If the error was the other way around this could be an explanation, but the reverse is true. The machine with a US keyboard gets the German menus.
5. Something strange in the HTTP headers? With help from a friend, I used the browser to hit a site that shows all the hidden stuff in each request. Both machines have identical Agent strings.
6. Something specific to IE7? So I tried using Opera instead. Going to Live Spaces I get English menus. Ahah! So I proceed to log in with my credentials, and BANG I'm back into German again.
7. So it must be something attached to my Passport account? But my other computer STILL shows English with the same credentials!!!

Aaaarrrgggghhh!!!!!

So the cause is a total mystery to me, and I'm not exactly ignorant on how websites and browsers work.

But the final point of this saga is that Live Spaces offers me NO WAY to change whatever it is that it thinks my language should be, nor does it provide any hints on how to fix this. In fact, there doesn't seem to be any way to get technical support on Spaces at all.

Grrrrrrr!!!!

OK, things just got really interesting.

On Sunday we had the first two episodes of Torchwood shown on BBC3 in the UK.

How to describe this show? Cross between Men in Black and the X-files? It leans towards the former (as the team are on the inside), though the atmosphere and feel are more like the latter.

While this is certainly a Doctor Who spinoff (spotted the anagram yet?), and there are numerous cross-references, no way is this a children's show. The first episode included such adult elements as bi-sexual kissing and date-rape (with a major character using an alien aphrodisiac), blood-spurting gratuitous violence, and some very dubious morality. The second one included some pretty explicit sex and voyeurism scenes, though no actual nudity, plus the "rat jam" scene (watch the episode). The writers were clearly making full use of their post-watershed* transmission time to push the boundaries of TV sci-fi.

From a story point of view, the first episode set the scene and used only a small amount of sci-fi elements (the Weevil and a few alien toys), and had a certain internal logic to it.

The second episode was clearly written to bring in more raw sex, and was pretty ridiculous as a plot line. I've always had troubles with alien possession as a concept, and this one took it to silly levels. As a plot it was very close to a well known SF movie. The daft concepts included an alien that could synthesise human pheremones sufficiently for aggressive seduction, and required human sexual activity as a trigger to feeding (apparently by absorbing a lot of matter from the victim, reducing them to a pile of dust). An alien? What do they eat at home? Even stranger was why the ghostly vaporous alien itself turned into a pile of dust when killed. Oh well, this is science fantasy like its parent. I can find my hard-sf fix elsewhere.

The characters still have to fill out. Gwen and Jack are central and therefore the most interesting, though Jack doesn't quite work as a mystery man if you saw his Doctor Who debut episodes. Still, we'll see what else we can learn. Gwen is the only team member to have a "life" and I hope the writers can manage to avoid the obvious plotline of "Gwen's nice boyfriend gets involved in a Torchwood incident and gets killed, leaving Gwen feeling (even more) guilty and alone with hilarious results". It's been done too many times guys. If he keeps on being so wholesome and supportive and generally nice, you can safely bet a dollar that they will slice him in a nasty way to give you a shock. What a surprise NOT!

All in all, this series has terrific potential, great casting (the girls will be instant geek-pinups across the planet I'm sure, and the ladies out there are already swooning over Captain Jack), and they have a huge problem-space into which plots can be inserted. I was hooked even before the first episode, but I'll bet that BBC Wales have another global hit on their hands. Lets hope they continue to get the resources it deserves; I would hate to see BBC internal politics get in the way. As for export to other markets, its pretty strong stuff so far and a lot of countries will push back on public broadcast I'm sure. Still, viewers have enough choice these days with satellite, cable and IPTV, so hopefully it will get the audience it deserves.

And I'm sure Cardiff will get a LOT more tourists as a result.

*Watershed. In the UK (which is a single timezone), broadcasters are allowed to transmit adult content after 9pm, when it is assumed that most children will be in bed and all parents know the situation. There are still rules, but they are a lot more relaxed. Some shows starting before 9pm would conciously introduce adult material after 9pm within the same show.

 Well I don't know.  Can it really be so hard to find a definition that works?

Or does it all come back to office politics?

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BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Pluto vote 'hijacked' in revolt

How long are they going to make us wait before they announce the broadcast times?

Can't wait to see how this works out. Looking at the quality of some of the recent Doctor Who scripts, I'm quite excited to see what they can do with this format.

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BBC - South East Wales Torchwood - a new sci-fi thriller set in Cardiff

Today I was shown a survey conducted in the US (I don’t know the exact source), it emerged that 17% of Americans (households?) think they have HDTV at home, but in fact don’t have it at all.

I imagine this comes from people having large screen TVs, or plugging an HDTV set-top into an SD set.

But it’s indicative of some struggles that will burden the HD services as they roll out in Europe. I still get furious when I see electronic stores selling 480p plasma screens alongside real HD sets in the same section of the store, but making the system spec so obscure most consumers won’t notice the difference except the price. I've even seen some of these lemons labelled as “HD Compatible” (twice it was hand written) which is uncomfortably close to the official “HD Ready” logo program name.

Guys, if you are trying to buy a real HDTV in Europe, make sure it has the "HD Ready" logo on the TV. Some of the stores are working really hard to get rid of their old crap TVs and screens before the public get wise. Don't be the victim.

Just because its a big and wide screen does not make it HDTV.

Its interesting that the IAU is now thinking of dividing the planets into Classical and Plutons (the latter being smaller but still accepted as "planets" so that Pluto itself doesn't get downgraded.

Personally I like the idea, especially the irony that now the famous classical music, Gustav Holst's "Planets Suite" once again aligns with the "classical" planets, as it was written before Pluto was discovered.

Honestly, you can't make this stuff up.

We just had the UK's ban on laptops in carry-on baggage retracted by the UK Government, though the Airports people are being slow to pass this on to passengers (what does it take? an email to your employees? Duh!)

Anyway, there is no way I'll travel without my laptop in close proximity to myself. A number of reasons for this:

1. Airlines are very careless with hold baggage. It gets bashed, dropped, thrown around and mangled.
2. It also gets stored with no air at very low temparatures. Is your device (and its batteries) approved for that? Might invalidate your warrantee if nothing else.
3. They dont accept any liability for it.
4. Most of my work resides on the laptop, including the applications that I use. Borrowing or renting a machine on arrival is a non-starter.
5. I'm not going to work out of a "cloud" server somewhere. For one thing, I often need to recover an old email or document from months past that I would not have planned to post for such access.
6. Laptops get stolen from checked baggage too.
7. Someone can "borrow" a case with a laptop, extract the hard drive, take an image of it, and put it back. In today's delayed flights it might make the original flight, or the bag would follow as just another delayed bag. Noone the wiser. But now someone can take their time attacking any encryption or other protection on the data without you even knowing about it. Are all your passwords strong enough for a week-long high-power dictionary attack? I doubt if all mine are.
8. I work for a high-profile company. Anyone looking in my checked bag can work that out. That makes it worth their while to do the above, hoping to pick up something with real world value.

So for me, no laptop in the cabin means no business flights. And I'll bet I'm not unique.

Well, after a long interval I decided to start doing this blog again. This was motivated by the introduction of Windows Live Writer, and the migration to Live Spaces in general.

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PayPal - Willkommen

Now that Skype has been acquired by eBay, I'm fully expecting to get pushed into using Paypal once again, and that means yeat another service I won't be able to use.

Paypal can be quite a good service, and I used to use it in England. But in Switzerland it is impossible. Not just hard, truly impossible. Why? Because I don't understand deeply technical and legal German language.

But isn't Switzerland a German speaking country???

NO IT ISN'T. Switzerland has four official languages, and Paypal is the only company I've found that doesn't support at least the French speaking part. We also have a smaller Italian speaking area, and a very tiny area that still speak Romansch (close to old Latin). But across the whole country another language is widely used and recognised, and often spoken as the local second language, and that language is ENGLISH.

But can't you use the British or American Paypal site? No I can't. They insist that we use the site for the country where we have our billing address. That's fair enough as there is contract law involved. But I can't even navigate around the Paypal.ch website, let alone understand the legal language they expect me to agree to.

But surely the French speaking part of Switzerland is too small for Paypal to bother with? Well maybe, if you think the cities of Geneva, Lausanne, Neuchatel, the Valais dont have a useful subscriber base.

I mean, for a company that does a lot of business with ex-pats living abroad (Skype), isn't Geneva and it's population of UN, NGO, and multinational employees something of a cash-cow?

After all, every other company seems to offer at least a French version, which I could probably cope with. And dear old Google provides local service in English as well.

So maybe Google will get my Skype business in the future.

• The prices were quite reasonable
• There are loads of rides for every possible age range and disposition
• Customer service was terrific, very friendly and helpful
• Very very clean and tidy, and well maintained
• Not so plastic and artificial as Disney. Disney has fake space stations. Europa-Park has a real  MIR station that was used to train Soviet cosmonauts. They also have a real full-size radio telescope, bought from a nearby ground station
• It is a lot more peaceful. There are crowds, but also open spaces. And without the constant ear-bashing that Disney throws at you with their constant jingle-tunes everywhere.
• Virtually zero American content. This is quite refreshing for a European of any kind, and made a welcome change from constant US brands and marketing. I like American stuff, but it was good to have a break from it.
• Oh, and they let you take photos and videos overywhere, including in the shows

A lot of the park shows distinct overlap with Disneyland. They have a haunted castle that includes many of the same sequences and effects as the Disneyland Haunted mansion. And the Pirates in Batavia ride looks a lot like Pirates of the Caribean with a Far-East makeover applied. Neither one is as polished as the Disney version, and the animatronics were not very good, but guess what The Kids Don't Care.

The big rides are very good, probably because the Mack company that runs the park builds these things for customers all over the world. Europa-Park started as, and continues to be, a showcase for products that other parks might want to buy. So they keep adding new things.

I think one strength here is that they are not tied to a brand like Disney or Lego, so they are not a simple marketing arm for and division of a big company. The park is there to be first and foremost a park, and they are doing a great job of it.