techno.blog("Dion")

While in a pub in London I was listening to someone talk about an emotional hedge. This happens fairly often I believe. The fellow was a die hard Arsenal supporter. Your gut would be, if you were a betting kind of chap, to bet big on the team that you love.

However, he did the opposite and bet on the OTHER team beating his beloved. The amont of the bet was defined by “winning X amount would make me feel OK about losing the match”. So, if Arsenal win, he is happy as his team one (and who cares about money!). If Arsenal lose, bugger. But, at least he wins a few bob.

I started to think about this emotional hedging and how you can go Agile, and “turn it to 10″. What about hedging your marriage? “I bet $X that I will get divorced” To calculate the amount you need to add up how much you will lose if you are divorced (special note in California!) and add to that the amount of money that would allow you to have a midlife crisis and give you a chance getting another woman with a fancy red car ;)

I think about paying for Sam’s college. Maybe a hedge here could work? You can go down the list and hedge against it all!

NOTE: Getting someone to take your hedge when you are involved is a lot harder!

I turned 21 when I was in Minneapolis. It was a little strange “being able to drink” since I had already been able to drink for years in England. I still think that the age for drinking and driving should be flipped in the US, mainly as I saw kids going nuts in college as it was “so naughty”.

The morning after my birthday celebrations I woke up groggy, laying without clothes on the floor of my bedroom. The last thing I remembered was getting a drink at Kierans.

That drink was a special concoction, recorded by an old friend Brian O’Neilly:

Flaming Sheep Shagger

Ingredients

• 1 oz. 151 Proof Rum
• 1/2 oz. Bailey’s Irish Cream
• 1/2 oz. Goldschlager

Instructions

Layer in order (Bailey’s at the bottom of the glass) in a shot glass.

Now, I swear that the Irish bar tender heard I was a brit, and put in some “green leprechaun” nonsense. Whatever it was, I apparently went nuts. I started to babble on singing about Rainbow which confused everyone as Minnesotans only know of Rainbow the grocery store. I also started talking about Braveheart, and god knows what else. I am happy to have lost those memories I am sure.

If anyone offers you this drink, be warned!

I listen to BBC radio all day. It skews me, as I end up knowing about the traffic issues in Guildford but have no idea that 101 is mucked up.

I love that I am able to keep up with radio via the internet, but my blood boils whenever I login to hear:

We are sorry but we are unable to broadcast this as you don’t live in England mate and we don’t have the rights

Or, something like that.

If I was naughty, I could try to get a friend to open up an ssh connection over the pond and try to tunnel through to trick the system, but I would rather be good. I with that I could pay, and see if enough people would feel the same, and then the BBC could get the rights for online broadcasting. Please.

I would also love to pay for BBC TV shows. Let us do micropayments and subscriptions so you can choose exacly what content you want (instead of hundreds of crap cable channels). This will also have the great effect of putting evolution into the system, and we would see survival of the fittest. Only content that people want will be shown.

Erm, wait, but that scares me too. What if the populous wants crap? Oh no.

My family name “Almaer” is a rare one. We have never found any others in England, and the same goes for the US. The family tree goes back in many directions, to countries all over Europe, and one line is aristocracy in England.

Then, out of the blue, I got a Skype message from “Jean Almaer”. Hmm, it could be bogus. I added Jean to Skype, and it took forever until he was online at the same time as I. I sent him a message and then it began. We knew that the name came from Belgium, and Jean Almaer lives in Flanders! I have gotten my Dad in touch, and we are working down the line to see if/where we connect. Pierre, Jean’s brother, is a linguist and knows about the history of our name:

“Almaer” is definitely a Dutch/Flemish name in this spelling. “ae” is the old spelling for long “a” (now replaced by “aa”). The German equivalent would be Almar. The etymology : “al” stands for adel/adal/German Edel, or Old English Aethel,Ethel, as in Alfred, Albert, Aethelred, and means “noble”, and mar (or “maer” in its Flemish/Dutch form) is an old Germanic word meaning “famous”. I was told by the same professor that “Almaer” used to be a (very rare) first name in Flanders. Note that the German family name “Almer” is of a different origin and stems from the Alm river in Bavaria. The Flemish name Olmer has the same etimology as “Almaer”. There are a few Olmers in Belgium, but no Almaers (except our family, of course)

My favourite part of an email was this sentence which was saying how exciting it is to work this all out:

To tell the truth, the “da Vinci code” story is almost as funny as a phone directory of West Mongolia, compared to this.

Classic :) I am excited to see more Almaers out in the world!

I woke up on Thanksgiving Day to some crusty warm popovers. Yummie. I appreciated them (and my wife!) a lot more this morning, as I just got back from London. Now, people like to poke fun of British cuisine, but for the most part I am quite happy there. For this trip I got too:

• Eat at three Indian restaurants (all good, but the fancy place wasn’t as good as the old fashioned curry house)
• Eat at La Porchetta, my favourite pizza place in the world
• Eat at a Nandos restaurant, which is a chain, but has spicy Peri-Peri which I enjoy

Lot’s of good stuff there, and I hope Ben appreciated the food compared with some of our other trips to Europe, which had him in horror mode.

My favourite meal of the day is breakfast. I have been spoiled by the american version too. Waffles, pancakes, french toast, crepes, decent bacon, eggs, hash browns, etc etc. The breakfast at our hotel (a nice one) was an awful euro-buffet. You are expected to double down on dodgy meat. In the end, I always end up going for the cereal and yoghurt.

To be fair, it is a touch better than Germany where the same meat comes out for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

What else did I notice about my lovely home town this time around?

ITV Play. Really?

There is a TV show on ITV called Play (used to be a network but was caught cheating) which is so poor that it amazes me that it exists. I had to have Ben watch it too. The show has a random idiot thrown in front of a camera and babbles on trying to get someone to phone in (or text or play online) to answer a really silly wordplay puzzle. The answers always seem obvious, but then you see that there are actually 399999999 words that could fit in, or the answer they are looking for it insanely bizarre. Sometimes the same puzzle is on screen for an entire hour and the host resorts to true silliness to pass the time. Why does anyone watch this crap? If you win you also normally win a whopping 10p.

Mangos are juicy

A big deal was made about six months back when real Indian mangos were allowed back in the states after a long embargo. Finally, the juicy mango didn’t have to get smuggled in. In London, which also doubles as little india, we found out that mangos are very juicy. As Ben and I were walking down Upper Street in Islington, we got belted on our backs. We turned around to see 10 youngsters whipping fruit at us. We thought they would laugh and move on, but they kept going! Ben ended up returning fire, and then we luckily reached our destination so they couldn’t keep wailing on us. Lovely.

London is a good place to bring a jacket

Ben showed up in London without a jacket. He will tell you that “there is a story” but really. No jacket in London. It also didn’t help that it rained all but 2 hours of our entire trip. At least our arms could get a work out as they held up umbrellas. Man the weather was bad. I heard that it got really nice on Wednesday (after we left). Getting back to sunny and 65 degrees has been a real pleasure :)

I took Ben out of London to see more of England itself. A mate lives out in the boonies (Coggeshall, Essex) so we head there to do a traditional pub meal, and a little walk. Watching Ben freeze was a lot of fun. Looking at the prices of houses was also fun. “600 thousand pounds for this dump in a little village?”. Ben had a truly big grin though when my mates wife told him that the national health service was crap and that everyone is lazy and soaks money from the government. “Your little socialist bubble has been destroyed”, Ben said. I really hope that he watches Sicko (even taking it with a pinch of salt).

Expedia messed up names

I was sharing a taxi to the airport with Brendan Eich. He was staying in another hotel (which he chose as he wanted to be closer to the conference, but it turned out that it was further away :)) so I got the cab and went over there in the morning to pick him up. When I got there he wasn’t waiting in the lobby so I went in and asked the front desk to call his room. “I am sorry sir, no Brendan Eich here”. Hmm, maybe he has checked out? “I am sorry sir, no-one called Brendan Eich has stayed with us”. I started to sweat. Was he at another hotel? I tried to think if there was another hotel with a similar name. Nope. I cranked open the laptop and got his number up. I called it. No answer. Bugger. At some point I would have to choose to hit the airport! Then the good news, he called back: “Sorry, I am a bit late. I am in the lobby checking out”. I walked back over and sure enough he was doing just that. It turned out that the hotel had him down under his mothers name. I guess being CTO of Mozilla is a celebrity-like situation so he has to check in under fake names ;)

A beautiful city

I did really enjoy taking advantage of being right in the busy. Walking past the Abbey, parliament, the Thames, the eye, down to Holborn, over to SoHo, through Hyde/St James park, past Buckingham palace, and back home, was real fun. A great city. As long as you realize that the tube will be broken half the time.

“You see $1800? I see $800!”

That is what I said to Ben as we were looking at flights to London for our trip to @mediaAjax. I am writing this on the flight itself as I look over Greenland. Only 5 hours to go! :/

It showed just how bizarre the pricing of flights can be. I taught a bit at Sabre, which gave me an appreciation of why that may be the case. One of the classes was so poorly managed that we ended up having to take equipment out of a closet, and installed desks and computers (they had double booked the training room and this was the best they could do).

Anyway, a difference of more then 100% for exactly the same flight? This lead to me booking the flight for Ben and put me in the position. Ben was giving me his info as I filled out the forms on united.com, but then a drop down shone like a beacon into my eyes.

MEAL PREFERENCE

Oh man, the prank was here. I took a look at the list which is surprisingly large. I had to get the right balance here. “Gluten free” would result in some paste that would be inedible (not that plane food is ever gourmet. I had the salad). Kosher? nah. Then it came: Hindu. This was a safe bet as it would just be vegetarian, which is probably one of the better options. I selected it and tried so hard not to crack up as we went down the list setting it all up. All I could think of was the site of a flight attendant walking up to Ben and saying:

stewardess from the 60s: “Mr. Galbraith, we have your special meal”
Ben: “Erm, huh?”
sft60s: “Yes sir, your Hindu meal”

I have been so proud of myself, and today the time was here! But, it all went arse backwards as Ben changed his earlier flight to the Bay to “spend more time with the family” (goody two shoes) and cocked up the times. This meant that he had no way to connect and had to get on another flight. I feel gipped. Next time, Mr. Galbraith.

The small print is really getting quite bizarre. Every year the small print seems to infringe on the actual content. Whenever I am back in England I try to work out what has changed since my last visit. These changes are often impossible to detect when you are living there every day, as they are too subtle.

One of the random observations is courtesy of the BBC news. Before every bit of video footage the anchor would say something along the lines of: “There is some light in this footage, so be warned”. It is as though the country has all become epileptic and any flashing lights would result in gibbering wrecks. Do we really need to tell people that there is a bit of flash photography? It seems like the culprit is the awful London 2012 Olympics logo that has been known to flash.

Of course, the US tends to be king of the disclaimer. Why do shows on radio and tv has to always tell you that whatever is being said, it isn’t necessarily the opinion of the station owner. Nooooo. Really? When you show Sadam at his trial, he isn’t speaking for the station? Wow, thanks for making it really obvious.

Where does it all end!

I couldn’t quite believe it when I saw an ad in the tube announcing a new channel: Channel 4 + 1:

That’s right. It is the SAME channel, with a one hour delay. I guess we have kinda the same thing in the US with HBO East and West, but that is a touch different. The entire UK is on the same timezone!

I love how instead of using something like TiVo, you should have another channel that gives you ONE more chance to watch a show. Of course, many people have Sky+ which has PVR functionality. I can’t wait for Channel 4 + 2.

It was also funny to see a couple of yanks taking pics in the tube…. and then take a second look and realize it was Matt Mullenweg and Om Malik (who are both speaking at the Future of Web Apps).

I am enjoying my time back in London. I am staying next to the Google London office in Victoria for now, and move to the Docklands tomorrow to speak at the Future of Web Apps which looks like a great show.

Back to the hotel…. you know it is international when you get this power to plug into:

As per usual I got in early in the morning. Victoria is great if you fly into Gatwick, as you can get the express train right there. Painless.

However, I was knackered after a non-sleep flight and wanted to shower and crash. They didn’t have my room ready though so I was told to hang in the lobby and they would grab me as soon as they got a room. I waited, and waited, and … When I finally went up again: “Oh yeah, we have your room”. Thanks.

After some clean up I hit the local store to top up my uk mobile. It is painful using a 5 year old beast when I have my iPhone in the other pocket (I know, I could have jailbreak-ed and put in another SIM….).

I was really happy to see a Nandos as soon as I walked outside. The peri-peri chicken + sauce is fantastic, and I think it will do great in the states.

I also knew I was back home when:

• It rained… a lot
• The trains went down

Anyway, it is fun to hang in the Google office here (very open plan), and I am looking forward to meeting interesting people at Sam Sethi’s bash (Sam does Blognation).

With the cricket world cup upon us in the Caribbean the usual classic pub-like song has come up.

It is playing on their myspace page and you can tell their genius from the lyrics.

Don’t make us pray for rain

Watch out for Monty he’s gonna make the ball bounce, Nixon’s behind you and he’s ready to pounce

Kevin Peterson is as English as the rest of us, the Aussies wont get him out for a duck billed platypus.

Michael Vaughn Is our skipper Plunkett bowls a dipper won’t try the local herbs but might smoke a kipper

The wicket might be sticky, bowling will be tricky, .

If you wanna watch the match gonna have to throw a sickie

The ground might be slippy

The Aussies might get lippy

They’re gonna need some help, they should send for Skippy

So come on now lads, time to pull on your pads

don’t’ put us through a months worth of pain

Aint won it before time to even the score

Don’t make us pray for rain

Remember hit the ball run and then we will all have tea!

Freddie flint offs a hero, he says it’s no biggie

But he can bowl and bat while rolling a ciggie

Anything’s possible if you follow your dream

Even Scotland have got a cricket team

The ball will be spinning, throughout the innings, And up in the stand Fletcher will be grinning

No heat rashes No rash dashes come on everybody let’s forget about the ashes.

You score there’s no kissing can’t argue with dismissing In the commentary box Geoffrey boycotts reminiscing

So come on now lads, time to pull on your pads

don’t’ put us through a months worth of pain

Aint won it before time to even the score

Don’t make us pray for rain

We don’t need, the rain, don’t need, the rain, don’t need, the rain, don’t need, the rain