Rambling - 2

In a vague attempt to cheer me up after returning to Brussels and immediately catching a nasty cold, an anonymous antagonist believes this is what I'd look like if I was a South Park character.

Yes, very amusing.

Yesterday I completed my quick tour of duty in the USA. I must say, it's good to be back in the city of Belgium, here in Eastern Europe. Well, close enough anyway, right?

Seriously though, I honestly have the feeling that I've been isolated from the world. Despite what they think over there, the concept of World News doesn't really exist in the USA, so I didn't know about the murders in the Marolles, nor the bikie violence in Melbourne. I've been under a rock, and yet the rest of the world heard about the firefighters who died in Charleston.

What does a European do when they find themself in Greenville surrounded by bars with televisions blaring sports news and serving weak North American domestic beer? They go to Addy's, a nice Dutch place run by a guy with enough self respect not to serve imported gnat's piss like Stella Artois.

Unfortunately, even as Addy himself admits, the locals aren't quite ready for a real bar with some real beer. It's only been a few months since Greenville changed the alcohol limits on beer, and if the new strength of the beers isn't enough then the atmosphere will certainly be a culture shock.

With much acrimony, my office finally accepted to move me from my hotel in the middle of no-where to a hotel right in the heart of Greenville. Stuck without a car, as Mr. Brewer was, the Greenville Marriott becomes really isolated as it's almost entirely surrounded by freeways. The two locations are really a fair distance apart without a car.

Freedom has come at a slightly additional expense (to the company), as I leave the company suite and move into the Hyatt Regency Greenville on Main Street. The Hyatt is a fairly old hotel and looks like it was renovated in the 1990s, compared to the Marriott which was built only a few years ago.

A trip to the United States of America wouldn’t be complete without visiting a real American home. Fortunately this evening I can now cross a few more things off my list: I’ve visited a truly American home just near Paris Mountain (and had myself a fantastic cook-out as a result), met a dog that can read, and finally seen fireflies outside of Disney cartoons.

An American colleague of mine, who is actually our project manager for our ERP system migration, kindly invited me out to his house for a real cook-out. This suited me perfectly. A large chunk of carefully seasoned and cooked steak and some giant spuds is always a great meal.

Stopping over for six hours in Atlanta waiting for my connecting flight now grants Atlanta a spot along side Brussels, İstanbul and Dubai on my list of airports I know intimately. Not really a thrilling accomplishment for a city that was once home to the Olympics, I suppose.

After a long flight, with so many security checks, it was a little daunting to arrive from the soberness that is Brussels airport early in the morning to the business airport in the world. Surprisingly, people were quite rude through-out the airport in general, but in small groups they were excessively friendly. Within 15 minutes of arriving, I was already thrown into a conversation about American politics, the Iraq war, and US immigration policy.

Today I'm flying off to Greenville, South Carolina, one of 31 Greenvilles in the USA (or 32, if you count Greeneville). I've been told by Mr. Brewer, who went not too long ago, that the southern hospitality is something to behold. Even after my last business trip to Miami, where I was told repeatedly that “this is not what America is like”, I think I need to brace myself for yet another culture shock.

I'll be privileged enough to be stuck for several hours in cattle class on Delta to Atlanta, only to wait there for six hours waiting for my connecting flight. Maybe it's not so bad, since it doesn't beat my 8-½ hour stint in Dubai. Fortunately SITA have Wi-Fi hotspots all over the place there, and it'll take me at least an hour to get through customs.

Whilst you all bestow me with sympathy comments (or not), I thought I'd share my thoughts (read: ramble) on some things that evoke a sense of culture shock for me.

Today was the Brussels 20km (half) marathon. I didn't participate because I was busy doing battle with an Emsen, wielding only a Fixa (bloody Swedes), but a mate of mine did run today.

John: my congratulations on the achievement! I feel sufficiently like a fat-bastard now, possibly even enough to encourage me to get fit for next year's run on May 25^th 2008. Maybe even the ING Brussels Marathon, since it's basically a choice between a 5km, 20km or 40km run back to my apartment. Hmm…

Meet Louis: Ordinarily he works for Bruxelles-Propreté, the garbos here in Brussels. Louis is an incredibly busy man since he started his second job with Nintendo as the half-brother of Mario. Unfortunately, this has left Louis little time to properly communicate with plebeians with regard to how garbage should be handled.

Lately, Louis and his team of public relations boffins have decided to attempt rectification of their past communications that disappeared silently — They have attempted to convey to the great-unwashed how glass should be recycled. In order to tailor the message to the masses, they've decided it's a good idea to treat everyone like children.

Belgian politics is amusing for outsiders, which probably helps explain why most Belgians are not particularly open about their political views.

Floating around lately is this, the NEE party («nee» is “no” in Dutch). NEE aims to provide voters in the up-coming general election a the choice to not vote for any of the candidates, as opposed to a blank vote which still essentially gives votes to all parties.

As a concept this really isn't too bad, since a vote for NEE would steal votes from parties you didn't really want to vote for but had no choice — overcoming the lesser evil principle. NEE's principal, Tania Deveaux, is offering 40,000 blow-jobs as a publicity stunt which has lately pushed the group into the international spot-light.

Oh dear, it's Eurovision time again. Having said that, though, the quality of the Eurovision Song Contest has risen greatly over the past few years given the state of the competition, with some countries quietly employing professionals to help write songs.

After last year's win to Finland, it's been hosted at Helsinki's Hartwall Areena, somewhere I've been hoping to visit for years for the Assembly demo competition.

I managed to watch the show using the excellent Octoshape P2P streaming plug-in which provided stable video of excellent quality. Finland's YLE with the EBU gave us some awful cut-sequences, Krisse the terrible tart (a not-so-funny Finnish comedian), and even Santa — without which the show wouldn't be tasteless enough to be Eurovision!

I recently watched “Who Killed the Electric Car?” which offers an interesting perspective on what happened to GM's EV1 — possibly the first practical electric car to appear. By its final generation, the car boasted the lowest drag co-efficient of any production car in history, clocked a top speed of nearly 130km/h (but was in reality limited because of gear design), and had a maximum range of 120–250km per full-charge.

The EV1 was amazing technology for its time, and not a bad looking car either, but for various reasons GM destroyed the cars and moved on to much more important things like the producing gas guzzling pile of junk known as the Hummer, and joining the Global Climate Coalition to help sway negative Kyoto Protocol sentiment. They had to do something special since they destroyed several tram-ways last century.

So, what happened to the electric car anyway?

I never knew there was a Disneyland in China until recently. Oh, wait, no, that's not Disneyland, it's Beijing Shijingshan Amusement Park (北京石景山游乐园).

It turns out the aptly abbreviated BS Amusement Park have nicely epitomised Chinese attitudes to western copyright law, and once again made their own cheap knock-off version of something successful.

For a few years now, I've been hearing about The 1 Second Film, but I've never really paid attention to it. The idea is simple: For charity, put together a one second animated film (made up of 12 frames, each frame repeated twice to make one second of total footage) using donated funds.

Simple? Not really. When people donate money, they are essentially buying a producer credit for the film. Each credit costs $1.00 or higher, which means there's likely to be a huge number of credits — So huge, in fact, that it's predicted the credits for this film alone will last 90 minutes. To make things more impressive, they're shooting this extravaganza on 70mm film stock.

Ninety minutes of credits on 70mm stock — Unbelievable.