Cardboard Spaceship

Munchau on the Euro

With the recent travils of Greece and the PIIGS in the Eurozone, it has been easy to find people who shout "Fire!  Fire!"  More telling is when the sober-minded and thoughtful commentators start to question the future of the Euro.  One of those is the FT's Wolfgang Munchau, who has this to say about Greece having to go to the IMF for emergency financing, and not getting it from fellow Eurozone members: (emphasis mine.)

"But either outcome will mark the beginning of the end of Europe’s economic and monetary union as we know it. This is the true historical significance of Ms Merkel’s decision.

While Greece faces the most acute difficulties, it is not the only member in trouble. There are at least four – Greece, Spain, Portugal and Ireland – that are probably not in a position to maintain a monetary union with Germany under current policies indefinitely. There may be several more, where the problems are not yet quite so evident. In the presence of extreme current account imbalances and a lack of bail-out or fiscal redistribution mechanisms, a monetary union among such a diverse group of countries is probably not sustainable."

Except, as I have written here, the Euro is roach motel, you can get in, but there is currently no way to get out, without the same kind of effort that it took to covert to the Euro, but under the aegis of an economic collapse. 

Is anyone planning for these kinds of contingencies?  I wonder if SAP has anyone looking, even speculatively, at this kind of future potential issue?  (I know of no-one, but then I have not asked.)

Anglo French Joint Nuclear Deterrent!

In one of the more surreal news stories I have heard in a while, the British and French have discussed sharing their nuclear deterrent. 

Say what? 

Suppose that the eternally gloomy Brown decides to kill all the Argies who are trying to nick the Falklands again now that they might have lots of oil and not just damp sheep, does he have to track down Sarkozy to whatever apartment in a nice arrondisement he happens to be having his current affair, and ask him for the key to the button? 

As someone working in the nuclear establishment said, "when they made Dr Strangelove it was supposed to be biting satire.  To us insiders, it looked more like a documentary."

What could possibly go wrong? 

Arthur Dent Moment in the Spaceship

Well, I'm feeling more and more like Arthur Dent, the long suffering hero of the Hitch-hikers Guide to the Galaxy.  Not just because I wander round all day in a dressing gown going:  "what?  I don't understand," and "can I have more tea?"

No, because they have a meeting in the commune to see if they are going to build a bypass in front of my house.  Feck! 

Will have to get lobbying over the next week or two to try and get that one stuffed.  NIMBY NIMBY!

(Not In My Back Yard, if you haven't heard it before.)

So We Lied About 50 Billion Dollars, Don't Be So Unsophisticated!

Holy fucking mackerel!  Sorry for the swearing, but on this occasion words actually fail me.  Read this story from the New York Observer about the collapse of Lehman's.   (Emphasis mine.)

There are two ways to react to the biblically proportioned report that Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy examiner released last Friday, which over its 2,209 pages (not counting appendices) has echoes of Grisham, Orwell and Ayn Rand.

The first is to lose faith in man. As it reveals, Lehman turns out to have used a secretive and dazzling accounting trick to fluff up appearances as it tumbled toward a violent end in September 2008. That month’s gruesomeness still reverberates: Moody’s not only warned this week that it may downgrade the American government’s triple-A credit rating, but it said that maintaining it will require “adjustments of a magnitude that, in some cases, will test social cohesion.”

The second reaction is to shrug.

Two former senior Lehman executives did just that this week, telling The Observer that the examiner’s autopsy, especially its news that about $50 billion was quietly scooted off the firm’s balance sheet for each of the first two quarters of 2008, was simply not a big deal. “If Valukas went into Goldman Sachs, what do you think the report would look like?” the first asked, referring to the court-appointed examiner, Chicago attorney Anton Valukas. “This would be a fairy tale compared to that.”

“It’s just not that big of an event. But that’s not what people want it to be, so they’ll make it not that way if they can,” said the other. “They just want to be mad and don’t know what they’re talking about and want to be outraged.” After an interview, that executive sent a follow-up email comparing the widespread furor over Lehman Brothers to the groupthink that sent America into Iraq after Sept. 11.

The idea, a year and a half after the biggest bankruptcy in American history began, is that criticism of the firm is the domain of unsophisticates. “When I read this, I giggle a little bit. Because $50 billion is a shitload of money, but in the grand scheme of things,” said a third source, a former managing director in England—where the accounting gimmick, named Repo 105, was given a legal endorsement that it couldn’t get here, “$50 billion is a drop in the ocean.”

I think that I need to go and lie down in the basement, because when jamming the whole of America into the shitter and the rest of the world with it is okay, because you are sophisticated, then we are totally fucked.  

Third Time is the Dream...

Remember that epiphany i had with the lovely iMac? 

I am sitting here writing about it on my top of the line HP PC.  No. Really. 

The iMac is a beautiful machine, but like a supermodel with a drink problem, it hides some rather odd habits.  I had all data loaded, in my case about 250-300 Gb worth, and then set up the sysnchronisation with the USB to move things to the PC using Chronosync on the mac, and second copy on the PC. 

Only, like La Modele, things get hidden.  MacOS likes to do its own file management, and present it as a fait accompli to the end user.  Consequence being when I tried to copy from the directory that I thought it should be in, it wasn't.  Or so it seems.

Also Office 2008 has some features that Office 2007 (PC) seems not to be up to speed with.  Causing incompatibilites.

So once more into the Rue de Rive, my friends.   This time I gave back the machine, and got an immediate and no questions asked refund.  I must have driven the poor bloody staff crazy over the last few days, especially a very helpful and blameless chap called Christophe.

They were excellent, and while the mac may not have worked out, I would gladly do business with them again on other things.  (Unlike the dribbling, craven, useless, festering pit of assholes at Dell.)

So, I thought, I am going to do something I would never do, and buy a PC from "gasp" a shop...

Went into Interdiscount, and bought a high end HP, a 27 inch monitor, and a few bits and bobs, came home stuck it all together, and it has worked seamless ever since. 

Live and learn.  Happiness is not cheap, nor is it only beauty.

Nothing but IMac Today Folks

Going to be an iMac bore again.

Remember that I said that I was thinking of not buying an iMac because I could not get RAID 1 in the all in one case.  Well the guy in the shop the tech head, just looked at me like I had two heads. 

Now I know why. Apple has something called Time Machine that takes hourly backups of the whole machine, and holds version of former files as well, so you never are going to lose more than 59 minutes work, let alone the whole system configuration and so on. 

It just bloody works this thing, and when I think how many hours I must have spent backing up the bloody PC.

I always though that Apple fan bois where just exaggerating, now I'm beginning to wonder....

More Macishness

Found two more interesting things. 

Photo booth, here's me taken with the on board camera.

 

And Garage Band.  Uh-Oh, as a not very talented former muser, that has to be a very ,very, dangerous productivity sponge.   1.2 Gigs of sampely goodness winging its way to me as we speak. 

Building the iMac

Been noodling away on the iMac for hours now, building the needed data and changeovers, etc. 

My God this is good compared with the PC running XP that I have been using.  

Everything just works, there are no cables everywhere, and its all seamless. 

Two missing Windows programs for me.  First is Second Copy, a really really useful synchronisation tool for going from one machine to another on a USB key.  Two seconds of Googling got me ChronoSync, which if anything is even better.  Second is Paint Shop Pro, but so far Apeture is good for the org, but I will likely end up buying another one, maybe Photoshop Elements or Pixelamator. 

But so far, only good things to say about the change. 

Problem with Dell Solved

I wrote about the problems I was having with Dell in the last post, and so what happened?  I went into Geneva thinking that I might buy an iMac.  I didn't, because it turns out that the all in one chassis does not have two drive bays, and cannot do RAID 1.

Got home to find a box from Dell, and I thought:  "bullet dodged, I do not now have two computers."

Plugged in the Dell, to find out that it was as dead as it was when I sent it originally.

Un-be-bloody-lievable incompetence.

So as I speak to you I writing on my new 27 inch iMac with RAID 4Tb drive attached.

It's like thinking that you've been blind your whole life, only to find that you've had too big a hat on, in the immortal words of Douglas Adams.

Dell are Steve Job's Best Asset

I bought a PC to replace my aging desktop, a Dell that has given me faithful service over the last six years, but is now getting a bit limite limite as they say in French on the obsolescence front.  (I am fine with that, six years is a bleeding epoch in hardware terms.)

what with it being a Dell, I thought I would do what I always did before, which is to call Dell, and get another one.  It's always been seamless in the past, so it should be again, right?

Wrong, how utterly wrong.  I do not know what has happened to Dell since I last ordered a machine, but my Gods are they ever in a mess. 

I ordered a machine with reasonably high spec, expecting to last a few years, so I put down more than a couple of thousand dollars. 

Dell then took three weeks to ship a machine, which is much longer than ever before. 

When it arrived, it would not even try and boot, so broken was it. 

Technical support was a sick joke, talking to a poor bloody script jockey in Bangalore on minimum wage, who knew less about PCs than I do.  (I have been using them for 20 years now.)  Conclusion, needs to be given back to Dell.

It takes them about three or four days to call to arrange the "next day" pickup.  

Then it goes into the Dellhole and now I cannot even find out what the status on the call is.  If I go to their website and type in the relevant details, it gives me a status on the relevant call number of "closed".  If I try and enter the machine reference, it just tells me that the site is busy, and try later. 

So, they have my money, and my machine, and I have nothing, but the feeling that I am trapped in a Kafka play written for outsourcers. 

I can honestly say I have never spent so much money for such appalling service, in fact, tantamount to fraud in terms of what I paid for as advertised goods, and what I got in response.  

I will never ever deal with the company again, in light of the total decay in capabilities that they seem to have experienced. 

In contrast I was in town yesterday, and went into the Apple Store.  Man, that was different.  I think that Michael Dell might just have won Steve Jobs another customer.