• Unexpected ukrainian beach holidays
• Mikey's ukrainian friends = hot
• Ukrainian Extreme Eating, the national pastime.
• Stalinist highway monuments
• How to entertain a 7 year old in the absence of a common language
• Writing HTML using predictive text on a phone sucks

The great photo-selection process has begun! I took 338 photos, but I'm uploading only a selection of them, in reasonably coherent sets. So far I've done a roughly 9-photos-per-day timeline, a set of the people I met (rather incomplete, I'm rubbish at asking to take photos of people) and a glimpse's at Mikey's amazing lifestyle in Ukraine.

I had a great time! More photos and much bloggage to follow.

Some extensive transcription of anablogs¹ is going on in the background. In the meantime, you can have my look at marketing in Ukraine and a somewhat expensive collection of pretty buildings and statues with trivia, the latter probably being only of interest to the bored and/or terminally geeky (so most of you, really).

[1] Notes made offline. Different from a traditional journal or diary in that they are intended for electronic publishing to an audience in the near future.

Stop press! Snakes on a Plane, officially the greatest viral movie meme ever, is already attracting unofficial attempts at commercialization in the form of Cobras in the Cockpit, a board game "based on a fictional movie" (i.e. "don't sue us") where you play the snakes.

And the meme rolls on!

Hat-tip to Karinski for the link.

You've seen the trailer (brought to you exclusively by Yahoo!, natch). Now see the music video. Featuring an actual, original song, actually about snakes, actually about those snakes being on a plane, actually made for the movie. It even features a Samuel L Jackson cameo, which obviously instantly doubles the quality of the entire video.

There is no end to this meme.

I steal music all the time. This is wrong, because stealing is wrong.

I also believe that artists should be fairly compensated for their work. However, I believe that paying money to record companies is probably the worst way of doing this.

Record companies are a technological anachronism. They date from the time when recording equipment was expensive, and music distribution involved an awful lots of physical pressing and shipping and packing and selling.

None of this is true anymore. A relatively small amount of money will get you a kick-ass home recording studio. If you can't afford one, you can rent some time in one, and it won't cost very much either. Distributing the music -- either for free or at cost -- is ludicrously easy; just put it on the Internet and set up a PayPal account. Nobody needs a record company to do this.

What record companies should be making their money from is selling studio time, and selling specialist consultancy services in specialist areas like producing, marketing, throwing concerts, etc. that members of the band themselves don't cover. Bands still need a service like this, and there's still lots of money to be made doing this. Record companies won't die, they just need to adapt.

Instead, how record companies make their money is by taking the lion's share of the cost of every physical CD sold, and justifying this on the basis that "people like album art".

People do not give a shit about album art. They are buying the music because they like the music, or the band. The band didn't paint the fucking album art, so why would anybody who cared about the band care about the album art? People were just told that they liked album art back in the 70s, when the only recording medium was the LP, which happened to require a giant cardboard sleeve, so they thought "hey, let's put some pictures on it!"

Back when I was a student, I used to steal music because I couldn't afford it. This was because of the aforementioned huge markup caused by anachronistic record companies. Maybe if music cost about 10% as much, then that would be okay. I could have afforded it then, I could certainly afford it now.

Nowadays, I could probably afford to pay even the ridiculous prices that record companies currently charge. I don't intend to do this. But even if I did, to get it, I would either have to go to a store and buy a physical CD, or wait to have one delivered to me. Then I would have to stick it into my computer and rip it to my iPod, which is how I actually listen to music. That would be a huge hassle.

But even then, I'd discover that the CD was loaded with all sorts of really evil shit intended to make me unable to listen to my music -- deliberate corruption, broken CD formats, even malicious software that installs itself on my computer without my permission and breaks it, leaving it open to hackers. I'd be crazy to buy a CD these days, those things are dangerous!

Of course, I could also download the music from an official source. That would be a lot more convenient -- unless I switched players. Or my computer crashed. Or I wanted to play my music on a friend's computer. Because officially downloaded music is loaded with all the same sorts of inconvenient shit as CDs are.

So really, a bunch of outmoded companies are offering me a really inconvenient way to pay for music I can't listen to at about 10 times the price that I'd be willing to pay if I could actually listen to their music. Which I can't.

So I steal music. This is wrong. Please offer me a workable alternative.

I don't often use this blog to plug my employer's products, and I've certainly never used this blog to promote a Microsoft product before. But as this has a lot of personal utility to me, I'll make an exception.

Yesterday MS and Yahoo! announced the beginning of interoperability between Yahoo! Instant Messenger and MSN Messenger (recently renamed Windows Live Messenger). Users of either client are now able to add users from the other network and chat to them just as they would anybody else. This is huge for me personally, because I'm on Y!IM all day, and never on MSN anymore -- but most of you guys are on MSN.

So if you're an MSN user, get the beta and then I can start talking to you (or you can try Y!IM instead, but fewer of you will care about that). You don't have to add my Y!IM id or anything -- it'll just work.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest was actually rather disappointing. There were a few good bits, but they were floating like tasty bits of meat in what was otherwise a thin soup of a movie. Also, if you are actually from the Caribbean, the sheer insensitive ignorance of a lot of the portrayals is very grating: there are no waterwheels on desert fucking islands, the architecture was all wrong, as were all but one of the accents, and most gratingly there are no cannibals in the Caribbean. This is not because nobody ever reported it, it's because there were almost no people in the Caribbean when Europeans arrived, and certainly by the time the East India Company was around all the natives had been killed off by a combination of (chiefly) venereal disease and good-old-fashioned genocide.

However, the perfect antidote to that disappointment was the sheer joy that was Superman Returns. If you've not seen it yet, I've not included any plot spoilers in the below, but I advise you to go in with no expectations, so skip the below until you've seen it. And go see it right now. And invite me to see it with you: this one could stand some rewatching.

Allow me to blaspheme slightly and say that I am actually not much of a fan of the original Superman movies. I don't just think 3 and 4 were lame -- everybody thinks that -- but actually 1 and 2 were not how I envisaged the Superman universe either. Lois Lane was too shrewish, snappy and arrogant like the comic book Lois never was, but more importantly, and even more blasphemously, Christopher Reeves was just too wooden as Superman. His Clark was not so much mild-mannered and bumbling and foolish. I'd already spent a lot of time reading Superman comics by the time I got around to seeing those movies, and I knew what personalities Clark and Lois had, and they were not those people.

That's not to say 1 and 2 were not good movies -- they worked well, and the characters as introduced were portrayed convincingly. But they were the wrong characters. And in Superman Returns, that's exactly what has been corrected. In his earlier work on the X-Men movies, Bryan Singer had proven to me that he really got comic books, loved them, and made sure the characters fitted the universe they grew up in. So Lois and Clark in Returns are not the Lois and Clark of the previous movies -- something many have noted disapprovingly -- but they are the real Lois and Clark. Lois is wonderful: still smart and courageous, determined and resourceful, but also warm and vulnerable and, removing one of the more annoying inconsistencies of the previous movies, no longer a smoker (the real Lois Lane never smoked a cigarette in 50 years of comic book appearances; she chain-smoked through Superman 2 as the result of a product placement by Marlboro). Clark is gentle and unassuming, but no longer a buffoon -- it is genuinely hard to reconcile him and Superman as the same person.

But the real leap forward is Routh as Superman. This is man you can really believe is a beautiful, beneficent alien, with his surreally perfect skin and body -- Reeves was always too reedy and pale. This real Superman is poised and confident, emotionally reserved as always, but unlike Reeves you can now tell what emotion it is he's reserving. Singer is masterful at portraying Kal-El's love for the human race while acknowledging the terrible burden of the constant demands of the world for a saviour. And speaking of saviours...

As Bob has mentioned, the religious references are not so much undertones as overtones, in places bordering on a sort of spiritual product placement. This is so beautifully and seamlessly done that I don't really mind, but it's a bit of an off-note because Superman in the comics is explicitly not a Messiah: in fact, the comic books repeatedly and at length take pains to make this clear: that he's not a god, does not wish to be, and cannot solve the problems of the world -- he is merely leading by example, inspiring them to greater things. But as I say, I can overlook this.

Oh, and as one last bit of fanboy wibbling, the flying effects? Spot on. I was really worried about them. All it took was a flashback scene and some very subtle use of body acting to take it from a stupid camera trick to a natural-looking ability. I was impressed beyond all measure.

I loved, loved, loved this movie.

I give up on this shit.

Our genes determine our ability to absorb experience; our experiences activate genes in different sequences and for differing lengths of time, altering our form further. Where’s the free will?

Studies of brain activity show that our actions occur a few milliseconds before the cognitive centres light up and produce a reason for our actions. Are we really conscious at all?

Are our lives just the emergent behaviour of the interactions of our genes with our environment? Is our free will an illusion, no more free than a drop of water is free to choose the random path it takes down a windshield—unpredictable, but with an inevitable result?

It was my roughly annual dentist trip today, to yet another new dentist. Last November's visit produced 3 fillings, all three of which have apparently been botched (Grrr! This only reinforces my belief that an online rating system for dentists is essential), and now host thriving little colonies of subsurface bacteria who by this point have probably already gained tool use and may well be on their way to developing music and art. Their thriving culture is going to be cut short, but they are not the main event: they're not what has my dentist seeing little dollar signs every time I open my mouth.

My most broken tooth, and my dentist's Christmas shopping money, is the result of a root canal in October 2002 (or so my blog informs me, how useful to have one's life so comprehensively documented). Being more filling than tooth, it was always pretty weak, and about 3 weeks ago it broke off completely, leaving a great big hole. I described this to my dentist, who initally assumed I was exaggerating and said "well, chipping is not uncommon..." but then he took a look and said "Oh. It really is just a great big hole. Wow. Let's take some x-rays."

Said x-rays confirm that there is barely any tooth left at all to glue a fake tooth onto, but he's going to do his best (and from the projected cost, his best will apparently be fabulous), and in a series of subsequent visits he'll be drilling and making "root posts" (which sound worryingly agricultural to me) and bridges (possibly) and then a crown in my choice of gold (classy!) or some sort of metal-china composite which, given its projected expense, better make a sort of bionic ch-ch-ch-ch noise every time I chew.

I still think this is all, over a multi-year period, cheaper than drinking alcohol instead, but it's beginning to seem much more like I'd have to pull out a spreadsheet and some graphing software to prove that.

So remember kids: brush your teeth. Or you too will know the shame of hearing your doctor book an appointment for a new kitchen the moment you step out of his office.

Don't you hate the way your brain is fried at the end of the week, so just when you've suddenly got the time to kick back and chat to somebody, your brain is too tired to come up with anything interesting to say? All week long my mind has been buzzing with thoughts of genetics and evolutionary psychology and now I can't fucking think of anything. Oh, wait. Yes I can.

So about a month ago, Mikey, M and I made a little agreement: every week, we would post a little blog about what had happened that week in our particular areas of expertise: his Ukrainian politics, M's British politics, mine IT -- or rather, since IT is a pretty gigantic field, the web specifically. We've all been rather rubbish at actually following through on this, but here is my attempt -- it's quick and bitty, to match your appalling attention span.

IE7: for me

In case you've not heard, Microsoft is bringing out Internet Explorer 7. This is big news if you're a web developer for two reasons: the first is that IE7 fixes a lot of the worst bugs of IE6 -- meaning the scope of things you will be able to develop reliably across the two major browsers (Firefox is running at 20% market share across Europe, 40% in Germany) will suddenly be a lot bigger, which is a great news.

The second reason is that it will break every web page that currently uses Flash -- which is an awful lot of pages -- in a rather annoying way: all flash controls now need to be "clicked to activate" (something you may have already started seeing if you run Windows XP SP2). This is the result of Microsoft losing a lawsuit against Eolas, who had a patent on "things that work in a web page without you clicking on them" (patents are stupid. See?). Microsoft decided it would be easier if everybody in the whole world changed their web pages, rather than actually licensing the patent. Oh well, tough luck for us.

IE7: for you

The other interesting thing about IE7 is that you're going to install it, whether you like it or not. Why? Because Microsoft is making it a High Priority Security Update for Windows XP.

Remember last year, when all those worms were going around, and Microsoft advised everybody to turn on automatic updates, or face the dire and horrible consequences? Well now those security updates are going to automatically install an entirely new web browser on your machine -- depending on your settings, it may just do it and not even tell you until after it's done.

For me, this is great news -- I hate IE6, and it makes my job difficult. For you, this is probably not such good news. IE7 is not a "fix". It doesn't just fix some error and leave your computer unchanged. IE7 is a totally new browser, with a completely new interface and dozens of new features, like RSS feed support.

Those are good features, and well done to Microsoft for seeing the competition and adopting their best ideas rather than trying to invent a competing standard as they have in the past. But installing a change of this magnitude automatically is stupid. This is the kind of thing that is going to scare novice users, frustrate experienced ones, and worse, make really, really angry the ones who use internal tools or plugins that aren't available for IE7 to do their jobs every day.

And as the BBC article mentions, Microsoft says it will "be possible to uninstall the program if people try it and then do not want to use it". A security fix that you can uninstall? That's not a security fix.

So Microsoft is producing an untypically Microsoft piece of software: IE 7 is a really good new browser -- to my shock -- but delivering it in a way that is callous, thoughtless, arrogant and typically Microsoft in every way. Oh well, 5/10, and an extra point for trying. But still not good enough.