Caboose

[originally via MeFi] A mention of the town of Concrete, Washington, in this article.

It’s not a place that gets mentioned much.

(IMDb link)

One word: Fun.

It’s very silly, but it’s supposed to be. The special effects are used well and there’s enough plot to keep you watching. Most of it’s funny and there are some good cameos (Carrie Fisher pops up everywhere these days).

Go and watch it, lots of martial arts stuff without all the pretentious pseudo-philosophy of The Matrix.

One thing I noticed while I was in Turkey was the number of motorbikes around. Japanese mopeds seem to be the most popular but there are also lots of mysterious old bikes.

I thought at the time that they looked a bit eastern-European, and I was right. The most common makes I saw were MZ (DDR) and Jawa (Czechoslovakia).

I’ve added a Turkey 2003 section to the Journeys part of my site, enjoy the pictures.

I’ve now got a semi-automated way of generating photo albums, I still need to sort out some kind of database though.

Last night’s distraction was working out how to put Turkish letters into HTML, read on for more information.
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Alex, a friend of mine from my Antarctic days, has set up her own website with much more information than my efforts.

Have a look at her site.

I’m back from Turkey and into the stage of sorting everything out. The washing machine is full, my pack is empty and the digital camera is busy uploading pictures.

Once I’ve got all the pictures sorted out I’ll put them up here. Which reminds me, I need to come up with some kind of gallery script for this site. All the other ones I’ve seen seem way too complicated or way too simple.

Looks like a job for Perl and MySQL.

Due to the incredible heat in Turkey just now we’ve abandoned our walking plans, so I may be able to post the occasional update.

On Tuesday we’re off on a four day yacht cruıse round the coast from Fethiye.

Turkish keyboards are a bit tricky, they’ve moved all the punctuation and swapped i with ı (that’s dotted and undotted I for those of you with the wrong fonts).

There probably won’t be any new posts here for the next three weeks, I’m off on holiday.

I’ll be away until the 29th, walking around part of the coast of Turkey on the Lycian Way. Checking my email will probably be difficult, so don’t expect a quick reply if you mail me.

The digital camera is going with me, along with a load of batteries and a solar-powered charger. Expect some pictures when I get back.

Bye for now…

I thought digital radio was doing badly here in the UK, sets are expensive and people are being very slow to change over. In the USA things seem to be even worse, according to this article in the NewScientist their system has been judged too poor for broadcast use.

After a quick look on Google I turned up some tests carried out by Canada’s CBC, they don’t seem too keen on IBOC quality either.

One thing that really puzzled me while driving around the States was the lack of RDS, which meant constantly having to manually retune and not getting station names displayed. Is American radio just generally neglected and technologically backward or did I just pick up a bad impression of it?

This morning I found this article, written by a former Qualcomm employee about the struggle between GSM and Qualcomm’s IS-95 CDMA system.

Quite apart from the fact that he really doesn’t seem to know much about GSM technology (GPRS doesn’t require a separate carrier, bandwidth can be dynamically reallocated for data), it seems to be the usual American rant about how CDMA is technically superior.

This is true, CDMA makes more effective use of available bandwidth. That’s why both the European and American variants of 3G use CDMA. But that’s not the point. The reason GSM has been successful is that the phone manufacturers and networks have generally provided the public with what they want.

Very few people care if their phone uses some amazingly advanced technology, as long as they can make calls, send text messages and download horrible ringtones. None of the American networks (GSM or IS-95) had even managed to negotiate sending text messages between themselves until fairly recently. It’s the services, stupid!

Qualcomm’s monopoly on IS-95 chipset pushes up prices, the small market for IS-95 phones means that they get whizzy new features later than GSM or not at all.

OK, CDMA2000-1x may be a lot faster than GPRS, but I can read my email on my phone while relaxing in the Spanish Pyrenees or hurtling around the streets of Rome. If my phone breaks I can take out the SIM and put it in another phone without having to change numbers.

So, GSM isn’t perfect (try reading any of the standards documents!) but at least it’s better than a single-company monoculture.

Disclaimer: Of course, you realised that when I talked about reading email while hurtling around the streets of Rome I didn’t mean reading email while actually driving, didn’t you? That would be stupid.