Nerds and Geeks

You don't just have to be a techie to be a nerd or geek, although many are. Just today for instance I was reading that the UK's version of the coronavirus track and trace app didn't work that well and they'd abandoned it in favour of the one jointly developed by Apple and Google. I don't know about anyone else but derrrrr. I did wonder at the outset why the UK government would bother trying to outdo the nerds and geeks from two of the biggest and in my view best tech companies going. It was always going to be an uphill battle but I'm glad at least they've now seen the light. What was it Churchill said about the Americans? He said you can always count on the Americans to do the right thing.... after they've tried everything else first. Sounds about right for the UK too.

Just this week we had some friends over for lunch (first time since the lockdown was eased) and somehow the conversation got around to accountants (spoiler alert I have an accounting qualification). Apparently they are all OCD (I think that's the correct acronym but in any event it means Obsessive Compulsive Disorder which is just about what our friend meant). Our friend therefore asked me if I am OCD. Tricky question actually. If I said no, any subsequent display of anything approaching compulsive behaviour would be highlighted no doubt. If I said yes, it would simply prove the point. Of course I said no... just before I wiped the kitchen counter 5 or 6 times. 

That isn't why I started this post though. I have been watching lots of You Tube videos in the past few lockdown weeks. What a choice! I started out searching for interesting things but quickly homed in on the daily broadcast from 10 Downing Street (I know, quite painful at times), some history podcasts about WWI in the main, but mostly live music from the bands and artists from the 60's and 70's that I like. It has become something of a compulsion for me now.... there I have acknowledged it... but what a wonderful journey.

I don't know how it has happened but as I type I am watching a 3 hour special celebrating the 25th anniversary of the death of Rory Gallagher. 

Not a well known name I know but Rory was a fantastic guitarist. I remember watching him many times in the 1970's and he was always great. He was one of those guys who had no idea or interest about the business, just about playing. He was very good indeed. This special has some people playing who I have never heard of and they are also really good. It made me think that you have to be really lucky to make it in that industry. Skill alone just does not cut it. But how on earth did I get here watching this?

It came about because I also found several channels on You Tube from people who assemble these wondrous clips and in some cases long segments of live concerts from the 1960's and 1970's ... the era that I listen to. I imagine there is the same for other interests and times. One guy I have now subscribed to has dozens of such long segments on his channel and only a couple of days ago I started looking at the dates when he/she put them together. Many were at random dates over the last 3-4 years but a growing number are coming every other day now. Clearly someone else has lots of time on their hands too! The fact that one of the segments I watched yesterday with Janis Joplin, Cream and Pink Floyd was premiered only 3 days before and had been watched by 20,000+ people already says lots I think. 

Not just me then.

Lost in Translation...maybe

Spending time in Penang has been a wonder and a great enjoyment, although at times it has been a little puzzling. The local "can" is a trip for example but it's not just here that has them. I did wonder how many people speak English or a variant globally and from my pretty basic Google search, it looks to be around 1.5 billion or 20% of the world's population (see here and here). Of these probably a quarter are native speakers, the remainder speak English either as a second language or an official language of the country (where for example many dialects exist so English becomes the lingua franca). Obviously many of these latter countries are ex-colonies but it certainly has spread the language far and wide.

As I mentioned before, there are local varietals. Take 'can' for example, this is what Merriam Webster's dictionary says:

'intransitive verb. archaic : to have knowledge or skill. auxiliary verb. 1a : know how to She canread. b : be physically or mentally able to He can lift 200 pounds.'


Manglish on the other hand is a little different but essentially similar so whilst you think you get what the other person is saying, somehow it doesn't quite go all the way. There's a neat book called 'Honk If You're Malaysian' that tries to explain. 

It cannot because the English spoken here is a dynamic evolving language not the one written in the OED for example. Here is an example of the use of 'can':

'English: Would you be so good as to turn on the tap, please? Of course!
Manglish: Can on the tap-ah? Can!' 

Hope this helps.

History is a bit difficult to follow too. Winston Churchill once said 'history is written by the victors', as did the first Indian leader Nehru but these quotes simply followed Bonaparte's dismissive put down: 'what is history but a set of lies agreed upon'. So those history books that you read at school were pretty likely wrong or at the very best put forward only the history of one side, ignoring and maybe even demonising the other. Having visited Rome many times and taking in the majesty of Trajan's Column at the end of the Forum, you do wonder if you know some of the story behind it, just why Trajan chose to destroy and entirely eradicate the Dacians (modern day Romania) with the only reference to it remaining being the hieroglyphics on the side of the column. 

Nobody knows all the details. Perhaps the written histories have been lost over time. This is quite likely as only fragments of Rome's long and fabulous history have survived. Sacking by the Goths, Visgoths, Vandals, Huns and probably any other barbarian tribe that happened to be passing in the late 5th and 6th centuries didn't help; but also a specific and deliberate erasure of bits of history that the next major incumbents (the Catholic Church) found distasteful or which presented the Romans in a better way than the new church wanted. OK to talk about feeding christians to the lions in the arena (Romans are bad guys) but probably not so much about all the learning and medical advances that the 'evil' empire promoted (Romans were innovative and enlightened). That may encourage people to learn more about the Romans and appreciate what they brought to the world... and maybe think twice. That wouldn't support the contemporary initiatives at all. 

This isn't unusual in a post colonial world or in a world where major change has occurred. The new incumbents recreate a recidivist form of history that makes them look better. The Soviets for example had to acknowledge the Tsars of the past but their take on things were that these Tsars were an unelected elite that just kept fighting wars against other countries' unelected elites in order to maintain control over an empire of starving serfs. Of course the irony of this point of view was totally lost on the Soviets themselves; as they were in fact doing the precise same thing.

This is all a roundabout way of talking about Singapore's 'creation'. Colonial history has it that Stamford Raffles founded the colony in 1819 taking a malarial swamp and turning it into THE entrepôt of the Far East. Subsequent history is broadly aligned as probably there is so much of it written down, however pre-history is substantially lacking as virtually nothing is written down and I can imagine those first colonial settlers thinking there's nothing here, let's do something. But there was pre-colonial history and here is Wikipedia's brief take on things. What is not stated is how many people were about at the time. Now there's 7 million but back then were far fewer.

Singapore's geography of course has always meant that it has acted as a significant entrepôt for the region. The Romans had heard of it but the Chinese, Indians and Middle Easterners were very familiar with it. Pre-steam engines, traders could only trade abroad courtesy of the seasonal prevailing winds. This meant an annual trip with a 6 month wait for the winds to turn the other way and therefore something approaching permanent settlement by non-native traders. None of this was apparent to the British when they arrived however. All they saw was swamp. Hasn't that changed? You should see Sentosa Island these days; more Las Vegas than anything else.

Whilst we were visiting we went to a museum, the name of which eludes me and which dealt in sections with the early history and pre-colonial history. One section dealt with the traders that came from overseas and what they brought to the island. The Middle Easterners brought tons of stuff. Africa brought ivory and gold; the Middle East brought frankincense, pearls, turtle shells, corals, perfumes and oils; South India and Sri Lanka brought cotton, textiles, gemstones, ivory, ebony and pepper.

The Chinese brought tons of stuff too: silk, tea, cotton, iron, porcelain/ceramics, musk, clay, sable, bronze ware and beads.

As for the Europeans, well...

Made me think of Monty Python again.

   

The Wild West Part VI -- Road Trip

Navigating by GPS is great, but realistically you have no real idea of the big picture. I could plot a course to the Million Dollar Bar in downtown Jackson just fine with my GPS, but I could not plot a 4 day road trip across the prairie to Chicago that would take in the places where we wanted to stop off and visit along the way without that old style thing... the map. I love maps, I really do. I love to see where I am and where other interesting places are that I have never visited. I also like to see where I have visited in the past as that brings back some very happy memories so have bought some big area maps for home and have started to push little pins into them marking where we have been! I know, pretty anal. Whatever. So I bought some road maps and along with Google Maps started plotting our way back to Chicago. Total distance approximately 1500 miles with stops and side tracks along the way; 4 days and 3 nights; how long in each side visit....

See. People still do do back of the envelope!

It took us to some fun places too. The further east we drove, the more cars, people and towns we encountered. The stretch across Minnesota was fairly busy. It could have been the 4th July driving weekend I suppose but that bit wasn't as enjoyable as the earlier bits. For accommodation I chose wherever I could to stay at places on the Missouri River, trying to keep a Lewis and Clarke theme if I could. It didn't work after the Little Big Horn excursion as that area is almost totally devoid of towns, the nearest being a tiny town called Hardin where things closed down at 8.30 pm which came as something of a shock when we were looking for dinner. It turned out just fine in the end though but it did make us consider that we should probably look to do things earlier in the evening for the next couple of days.



We chose Wisconsin Dells because of its proximity to Chicago (less than 3 hours on our final day) and because we wanted to try some cheese! However if you want to know what we enjoyed the most on our road trip, in no particular order they are:

The Spam Museum in Austin, Minnesota. Viv bought a can when we came back to Penang!

The sight of Viv cleaning dead bugs off the windscreen and the amount of hand soap used afterwards

The really beautiful locations

The huge country... and of course the hat.

The ever changing roads

Most of all the company

Ch..Ch..Ch..Ch..Changes

I've been coming to Toronto since 1987 mainly to attend an entrepreneur's course called Strategic Coach but also for fun.  Its a great North American city, now ranked #3 in terms of population after New York and LA, with lots going on.  In fact the Immigration officials find it difficult to understand why I like coming back here and are relatively disbelieving when I say its for fun. But it is.

This also means I've been witness to lots of things happening in Toronto, particularly the construction. But there's been lots of other change too that in retrospect seem inevitable but at the time came as big shocks.

Sam the Record Man

Who doesn't remember Sam's?  Touted as the biggest record shop in the world, when I first started coming to Toronto Sam's was a mecca for me.  I could always find hidden gems of music by artists that I couldn't find elsewhere and at great prices too. Living in Bermuda this meant carrying armfuls of first LP's, then cassettes and later CD's back home.  They weighed a ton!

Then came iTunes and downloading music and Sam's gone completely.

Other stores such as HMV made the transition to DVD's (and not music DVD's at that) more quickly than Sam's and so found a somewhat longer lease of life but with Apple TV, Amazon and Google everything, these stores are redundant.  Obsolete.  Some are hanging on but the opportunity for the mainstream has gone completely.

Some may survive in stripped down mode as niche players because vinyl really does provide better music reproduction but for the most part, the digital equivalent is well good enough… including myself.  I still have my records and a turntable but rarely play them.

Some of my records

Time has moved on and the industry has been decimated by digital with Apple's iTunes in the van now that pirate operations such as Napster have been closed down.

Book Shops

I love books and bookshops and have never thankfully made the transition to Kindles or other iBooks.  But I am a dinosaur.

Actually young people don't read these days.  Well not more than the headlines and maybe an executive summary, but certainly not Dostoevski type books where the central character, Joe the mujik, endures untold hardships and miseries before tragically dying or committing suicide on page 972. The type of books we were asked to read at school for our exams in fact (I still shudder when I think of Thomas Hardy's Trumpet Major -- a hideous book for a 14 year old).

Since Amazon sold books online and then Apple and others digitized books of all types, traditional book shops have been under pressure.  Barnes & Noble's owner is currently trying to take the company private as he figures all their high street real estate is worth more than the business.

I still set aside time to browse and immerse myself in the wonders of book shops and always, just always, come out with a couple of new treasures.  But as I said before, I am a dinosaur.  Virtually nobody else buys books.  Even professional qualifications such as CFA disseminate their required reading list in digital form so no longer do candidates have 4 or 5 feet worth of books to hold somewhere at home.

They don't cost any less though.

Sadly the biggest bookshop in the world near to Sam's just closed down too.

Photo Shops

Time was that I used to have much of my photo developing done in Toronto when I visited.  Bermuda was very expensive for this so waiting a few weeks was really no problem at all.  Photography shops such as Blacks proliferated.

Then came the camera phone and digital camera.

The first ones weren't so great that the quality was better but the ability to have your photos lodged on your computer instead of stuck in albums was a huge step forward for the new generation.  I still have a couple of dozen albums from before 1990 at home that I keep promising myself to transfer to digital format and put onto my computer so I can throw out the hard copies.

Furthermore with old technology you had to keep and develop the crummy photos too.  How many times have you had only a couple of good ones from a roll of 24 or 36?  If you're a lousy cameraman like myself, the answer is quite often.  The ability to take hundreds of shots without fear of running out of film therefore is compelling.

So is the quality today. I have friends who are 'real' photographers and say that the old film format produces better shots and as with vinyl and music I can believe it.  But I really don't care.  The new digital camera on my iPhone produces results that are just fine for me.

Blacks recently closed their megastore near the Eaton Centre and I happened to go in there a couple of times in the last couple of weeks.  The first for a picture frame and the second to develop some photos on an underwater camera where I have no idea what the results will be.  They are now niche players in a digital world again providing more services than simple photo development.

Copying and Printing

This is more of a work in progress as legislation hasn't caught up with technology yet enabling the use of digital signatures and storage at a total level.  Someone told me yesterday that Canada last year passed laws allowing digital signatures… so the need to print and physically sign has gone.

The only thing that remains is the ability to do absolutely everything digitally via computer apps storing paperwork in someone's cloud.  That is coming.

I attended an Apple workshop today discussing the role of iOS (their mobile operating system) for business all of which centered on the growth and diversity of apps available for all types of business.

Where is Kinko today?  Not around for sure.  Again the major office supply shops such as Staples and Office Depot are still around but most printers have been relegated to niche players providing specialist services generated by someone else's digital medium.

Scary prospects for someone who keeps a hand written diary!

And as for construction, the subway is still the same size as it was 20+ years ago crazily but the view of downtown is simply canyon walls everywhere.

The lake is somewhere over there...