Back To Reality

I've at last returned to Puerto Rico, after an all-too-brief 6 week stint in the UK. Having searched fruitlessly for several days trying to find a decent flight, I finally found that the only direct flight here - which was the one I wanted to begin with - is actually perfect.

Why does this come as a surprise ? Mainly because I initially searched, naturally enough, for a one-way trip. The price : £1390, rather on the steep side, but perhaps not all that astonishing given that it's B.A. This is considerably more than I'm willing to pay, having already lost one flight back and half-cancelling my flight to Austin for the AAS*.

*I can use the money again, but only on another flight with American Airlines from San Juan.

However, out of morbid curiosity I decided to search for a return flight. Now the direct BA flight is a highly competitive £550. That's right : for taking me twice the distance, they're prepared to charge less than half as much. My conclusion from this ?

ECONOMICS IS BROKEN !!!

Further proof of this is rendered by the fact that getting a premium economy return costs the same as a regular economy one-way.

What.
The.
Frak.

I arrive back to discover that everything else is broken too. No water, phone, internet, or television. Electricity does work, by some miracle, although without internet or television it has limited uses. And for some reason the electricity company are trying to charge me $72 despite the fact I've been away for 6 weeks and turned everything off before I left. Then the fanbelt in my car decided to pack it in, along with the air conditioning (in my car that is, not in my house or I'd be dead from grief by now).

Some things are easily fixed. The water was off because my landlord turned it off, as the hot water tank keeps leaking. And because he's perhaps the nicest landlord in the world, he took me to buy a new fanbelt and got his brother-in-law to fit it for me. No-one knows why the television was off, but a phone call in work soon fixed that.

So I have the essentials - I can make tea, shower, make tea, watch Jon Stewart, make tea, drive back and forth to work, make tea... but not make any phone calls or use the internet. But I can make tea. I can't play with my shiny new tablet though, but mostly that's because I stupidly forgot to pack the charging plug. Good job I can make some tea. I like tea.

Liberty were supposed to send a technician around to investigate the internet/phone problem yesterday, but they never showed up. A phone call (from work) revealed that the guy had tried to call me to find my house so he could come and fix my phone.


...

!

!!

!!!

Aaaaaargh !

Rhys brain melt now !

The Curse of Christmas

About half of all missions launched to the planet Mars have failed. The most recent is the tragic, much-delayed Phobos Grunt, which crashed... on Earth. Currently the only plausible explanation is the Great Galactic Ghoul, a great big space monster which eats approaching Mars probes.

A similar fate has befallen my Christmas's of late. Two years ago my nephew was born on Christmas Eve. Hurrah ! if you love nephews, that is. I've already articulated my thoughts on the superabundance of Peppa Pig, though this ghastly creature is but a trival distraction compared to the sheer Kubrick-esque mentality that is Baby TV. This is to say nothing of the horrors of changing a nappy or, worst of all, the total inability to check my emails for A WHOLE HOUR AT A TIME !!!

But I digress. Last year, my mum decided it would be jolly good fun to trip in the snow and break her ankle. Oh, joy. That was about a week after my dad got out of hospital having had a very sudden onset of septicaemia, just to make things that bit more fun.

This year we dodged a hospital visit at Christmas but instead got to enjoy New Years in the delightful surroundings of the cardiac ward, with my dad having exhausted the possibilities of septicaemia (having had a second bout earlier in the year) and instead gone in for nothing less than a quadruple heart bypass. Well, may as well take things to the extreme, I suppose. On the plus side, I got to enjoy this temperate island paradise a while longer, because going to the Austin for the AAS and giving a talk while that was happening was just not going to happen.

Oh well. Perhaps next year we'll get to stay home. You never know. Or, as has been suggested, we could hold a surprise Christmas in, say, June, just to catch the Carnivorous Christmas Cactus - for that is the most logical explanation for all the Christmas disasters - off-guard.

Karma

I was all set to write a nice inane little post about Christmas time in the Caribbean, when my plans were brutally scuppered by the unstoppable forces of karmic retribution. Yesterday I received a lovely email offering me money for CGI I've already done, which is always nice (this the second time this has happened). Coupled with my imminent return to the UK for Christmas, this gave me a warm glowing fuzzy feeling inside.

In this case the forces of karmic retribution took the form of a small oncoming car, which collided with the side of mine as I was leaving my house. The driveway from my house is steep, so it's very difficult to see anything to the right. So I've developed a paranoid habit of emerging just enough to see if anything is coming, then rolling back down if there is anything, and repeating the procedure until there isn't.

Most of the time, if anyone sees me they stop and let me out. So this morning, when I spotted an apparently distant, slow-moving car, I carried on emerging - an act of colossal stupidity. Because the car wasn't slow or distant at all. And my car's ability to make sharp turns has all the grace and elegance of a constipated sumo wrestler -  so I ended up on... ahem... the wrong side of the road.

In my defence, if the car had been doing the speed limit there would have been no problem at all. Alas, it wasn't. The driver tried to screech to a halt - literally burning rubber - but by this point disaster was inevitable. And so kerblamo ensued.

Fortunately my car also shares the sumo wrestler's remarkable ability to withstand large heavy objects colliding with it. It has a rather nasty dent in one side, and one headlight isn't working (the main beam, is, bizarrely, fine). The plastic light casing is intact, and the wheel is fine. Compared to the other car, this is nothing short of astonishing. For that much smaller car has a crumpled bonnet, a shattered windscreen, and generally looks like a wreck.

In some ways, there's no better place to collide with someone than Puerto Rico. For the locals are used to accidents and - by and large - surely among the finest in the world at dealing with people in distress. While I was fretting like a wet hen (do hen's fret when damp ? what about roosters ?) the driver was nothing but a model of jovial politeness. Long story short - I spent the entire day filing police and insurance reports.

What happens next in this particular saga, I've no idea (although I was assured many times that I wouldn't have to pay any money). One thing is certain : next time I'm moving to somewhere with public transport. Until then... home time !

More Hispanic Oddities

Somewhat of a dearth of posts of late, owing to Skyrim, which I think is a perfectly reasonable excuse. And why not ? My character, Bill, is a fire-breathing orc werewolf with a magic sword that can make zombies explode. Whereas all I do every day is write code and look at static. Even if I did have a magical flaming sword, I'd probably have to sell it on eBay. As for turning into a wolf, unless wolves have some hitherto unknown talent for IDL coding then that wouldn't help either.

"I told you to comment your code and I MEANT IT !"

About the most exciting thing I've done lately was to replace my expired marbete. This is the most basic level of car insurance, which everyone is required to have (it costs $200 and lasts a year). So I'm finally a legal driver again. Not that I was ever an illegal one through any fault of my own. I bought the car in an excessively Puerto Rican fashion, paying cash firmly in hand (which is entirely normal here), and then handing over copies of my various documents to some guy in a pub* to have the ownership transferred.

* It was actually a colmado but you get the idea.


This isn't as crazy as it sounds, although it's difficult to explain fully without becoming tedious. Anyway this guy decided to wait a full two weeks before telling me that he'd lost the documents I gave him so I had to give him new ones. And then another two weeks before the much-vaunted ownership details made an appearance, bringing my brief flirtation with the seedy criminal underworld to an annoyingly belated conclusion.

Rather more interesting was the drive to replace said marbete. Along the way I encountered one of the more insane examples of metal theft. Now I've heard lots of stories about people stealing copper cable, in some cases pretty extreme examples of thieves stealing hundreds of metres of phone lines. What I wasn't prepared for was the idea that people would steal the frickin' manhole covers.

"No-one will ever notice ! It's the perfect crime !!"

I should mention that there is no equivalent to vehicle or road tax here. So potholes aren't isolated, inch-deep depressions - they're present everywhere and are often more than 6 inches deep. It's better to think of them as mines - either they exploding kind or the digging kind, it's all good. Ironically, being used to random depressions in the road made me decide to completely avoid the apparently innocuous circular pit looming in front of, which didn't look that intimidating from the low angle of the driving seat until the very last second.

At the very last second was a different matter. Then I realised that it wasn't a shallow pit at all. It was a metal-lined tunnel with a depth measured in feet, not inches. There were two more examples slightly further on, but in these cases some helpful soul had decided to wedge in a large plastic bollard, like buoys of the road.

Which does beg the question of what anyone wants with a manhole cover and how they go about selling it. Anyone with the facilities to melt them down is certainly too rich to benefit much from manhole cover theft, so presumably they're sold in the same state they were stolen in. I can only imagine conversations that must go something like this :
- "Is this a manhole cover ?"
- "No."
- "Oh. Well, OK then."

Or maybe these thieves are more enterprising. Perhaps they're co-ordinating their efforts, and stealing from multiple districts at once. That way manhole covers aren't lost, they're just... exchanged. The thieves get money, the roads get manhole covers, everybody wins ! Except the taxpayers. And any unfortunate motorists who are caught unawares.

An Open Letter To amazon.wherever

Dear Amazon,

As you well know, I have purchased a host of wonderful items from your online store over many, many years. It would be fair to say that your chronic lack of shipping charges, coupled with your competitive pricing, occasional spectacular offers and excellent pre-order service, have not only made my life a good deal easier, but also prevented me parting needlessly with a most numerous number of shiny pound coins. Certainly while I was in the UK I would not have dared describing you with anything other than the most gushing of terminologies.

Alas, I am woe to report that this honeymoon period of so many happy years is now well and truly over. In these last few months I have found myself wrestling time and again with your shipping policies, and this is not the naked mud-wrestling with Jeri Ryan I would incalculably prefer to have in mind. Instead it's more the case of wrestling with a enraged bear that's just been given an enema made entirely out of bees.

Why yes, actually, I would like to see Jeri Ryan wrestle a bear. Is there some reason I shouldn't ?

It is true that you cannot be held responsible for the nonsensical "region encoding" which afflicts DVDs and blu-rays. Although this repressive policy of restricting what information one has access to depending on where one lives is nothing short of censorship by another name, it's not your fault. It's also true that you ship region 2 DVD's from the UK to Puerto Rico at considerably lower prices than you ship region 1's from the United States (despite Puerto Rico being a US territory, and therefore subject to the same domestic shipping prices as the States themselves).

Screw statehood. It's obvious that Puerto Rico should join the U.K.

For this you should be both praised and scolded. It is right and proper that I can effectively bypass the insanity of region encoding in an entirely legal way for minimum cost (the only penalty being that it apparently takes two weeks for the aircraft to cost the Atlantic - I suggest you might want to upgrade your Zeppelin to one of these new-fangled aeroplanes). Kudos for that. But this doesn't make it any the less baffling that it is cheaper to ship an American show from Britain than from the United States.

They also cope well with volcanic ash

Such weirdness is a forgiveable part of a complex automated world-spanning business empire. What is less so are your policies on what can be shipped to where. While you don't have any problems with wrapping up a DVD and whisking it - very slowly - across the Atlantic, apparently video game discs are allergic to airship travel. I expect it brings them out in a nasty rash. Fortunately it seems your .com division has some means of protection, but can charge 3x the shipping price compared to the U.K. for the privilege.

Of course, shipping anything electronic at all to Puerto Rico would be unthinkable. I'm sure you wouldn't want the natives getting ideas above their station. After all, who needs electricity in the tropics ? Everyone knows we spend all our time drinking rum out of coconuts with little umbrellas in. So of course I couldn't possibly need a pair of extremely small, lightweight and easy to pack headphones. Didn't stop you shipping me a rather hefty laptop cooling pad for some reason though.

Electricity ? No, it's powered by rice and beans.

The most bizarre aspect of all this concerns your flagship product, the Kindle. Given that you must inevitably bow to publisher's wishes, it is just about comprehendable that you cannot release electronic versions of books to a worldwide audience at the same time. Understandable yes, forgiveable no. This is taking all of the benefits of internet globalisation and feeding them to the Rancor. Which in my view is totally mammoth. You will pay the price for your lack of vision (although Emperor Palpatine probably wasn't thinking about lost revenue from book sales when he said this).

Admittedly, no-one with a pet Rancor will care much about shipping policies

But, as I said, this is at least understandable. What isn't is the fact that this applies not only to modern books but also to classics which are available for free in other countries. They say that you should never attribute to malevolence what you can attribute to stupidity, and this is surely a classic example. There is no motive, rhyme or reason to restrict a free product, and simultaneously point out in big clear freakin' letters that you can easily find this content for free elsewhere.

So, thank you amazon. For the largest internet retailer your shipping policies are remarkably anti-globalisation, and it certainly nice to see someone leading the charge to ensure everyone is treated differently based on wherever they happen to live. For the life of me I just can't think how that isn't an example of racism and bigotry, but of course that is illegal so I must be wrong. Good luck with that one.

Lots of love from

Me

XXX

P.S. Not that this will stop me buying stuff from you. Except in those cases where you refuse to take my money, as you often do.

P.P.S. Given my years and years of customer loyalty, it'd be nice if you'd approved my amazon store card. How exactly did you come to the conclusion that I have no credit history ?

P.P.P.S. I'm going to think about Jeri Ryan now, and possibly a bear. Maybe some bees too. Bzzzz !