A blog entry by Mathew, one of my colleagues as a Cambridge CS undergraduate, speaks for me too (except for the bit about visiting Cape Canaveral which I've never done, but want to)

Anyway the Full text is here and this seems like the best extract

Sure, I want to travel Earth too. I'd like to go deep sea diving, visit Tokyo, see the Grand Canyon...but there are plenty of other people doing those things. They're almost mundane. And there's something so appealing about the cold, unimaginable vastness of space--it's such a challenge even to truly comprehend it, far less explore it.

This is why alien abduction stories are stupid: The aliens don't need to abduct people against their will. Plenty of us would go willingly, even if some unpleasant medical procedures were part of the deal. I once explained to my ex that if I had the chance to go travel on an interstellar spacecraft and see the universe, on the condition that I could never return to Earth, I'd go. She couldn't understand how I could say that, and I couldn't understand how anyone could turn down that kind of offer.

He may have had the same discussion again, but I remember the "if you could leave the earth but never return would you" argument in a pub one evening. I was one of those like Mathew who would take that option immediately without a second thought, and despite being older and (possibly) wiser I still say the same thing.

Beam Me Up

DD

Some good advice in life (and I could be mis-quoting here) is to never try to teach someone you are dating anything complicated (e.g. driving a car, skiing) and never do business with your friends.

I've broken both rules on occasion and mostly regretted it. Both I and our marriage survived my attempt to teach my wife to drive a stick shift but it was close and will never be repeated. I refuse to teach her how to use a computer better, even though she asks sometimes,
because I know that it will all end in tears.

So far the one big risk I have taken with the friends thing is my current job, which was offered to me by a friend from years gone by. I'm enjoying the job but I think our friendship is suffering from the strains of running a business. I nearly offered another friend of mine a job here too. Fortunately, despite his being capable, our VCs decided we didn't need another IT person and so the offer got squashed. In retrospect this was a good thing as I doubt he would have got on well with the rest of the company. Since he was about my best friend from age 10 I'd rather retain the current friendship than take the risk on a new relationship.

The advantage of the internet with its connectiity and its anonymity is that you can make friends with perfect strangers. So you (we) can bitch about our jobs, spouses etc. without worrying that our comments get back to them. Even better, we have no idea what most of our on-line buddies look like or whether we could actually stand a sustained evening of conversation with them and we have absolutely no idea if we are also doing or have done business with them or not. Indeed there are a few people that I have enjoyable online interactions with that I'm pretty sure I would dislike instantly if we were to ever meet.

On the whole I think that is a good thing so consider this a virtual toast to online friendships. Long may they continue.

DD

My reader may have noticed that I'm playing with Stylesheets. Arguably with little success and I apologiss if you viewed any of my more hideous efforts. I expect I need to work on this a bit more before and I don't really have the time but I think we've got back to "acceptable"...

[As an aside - the standard blog templates on this sytem seem to use an extremely ugly TABLE mechanism instead of using <DIV> tags like any sensible modern page should. Mutter mutter moan moan I guess I'm going to have to rewrite the entire thing!]

Share & Enjoy

DD

I'm not really a car person - 4 wheels and an engine will about cover my requirements - but occasionally I can get seduced by a car. I bought one of the first new beetles in Calfornia - it was fun to drive, surprisingly roomy and you could fit a large pizza on the dash. When I first drove it I got hundreds of people asking me what it was like to drive and quite a few gave me more details than I really wanted to know about their teenage experiences in the OLD beetles of the 1960s.

I still miss my beetle, but I have no desire to buy another. "Been there done that" about covers it. Stil we see a lot of cool cars on the Riviera and there's one that I really want. When the fairy god mother blesses me with massive wealth I will purchase the new Aston Martin. And if I still have money left over I'll buy one of the old Jaguar E-types as well. In the pacticality stakes these are only slightly better than a Ferrari (better ground clearence and probably more reliable), but something about their looks makes me want one. My wife still pines for the Mazda MX6 she had in California - but I THINK I could convince her to drive an Aston Martin :)

Meanwhile I'll go on driving a Honda Civic and/or a VW Golf (i.e. a square beetle)

DD

While the French regularly irritate the heck out of me for reasons of politics and petty bureaucracy, they do have their saving graces. One of them is their attitude to life. The idea that almost anything will be improved with the addition of the right wine and some gourmet cooking.

I think this is taken to extremes with the Marathon du Medoc, which is a Marathon run past 42 (1/kilometer) chateaux of the Medoc and where the participants may sample the wine of the chateau and some accompanying food. Even better, these are not just any run of the mill wineries, some of these produce the most expensive wines in the world.

Not only that but the Marathon runner gets a pasta (and wine) meal the night before and - it looks like - one afterwards. All in all this would sem to be taking the idea that red wine is good for the body to extremes and it seems a little different from the deadly serious teetotal image of marathons in other places.

[Aside: This would seem to be the first useful information I have ever read in an in-flight magazine (Lufthansa's if you must know).]

Anyway as a regular hasher (the hash has been described as "a drinking club with a running problem") this seems right up my street and I'm detecting a groundswell of approval from other hashers so we may get a group together and run this in September. Readers may wish to wager on the number of kilometers completed, wines imbibed, time taken or combinations of the above.

DD

Iraq, Europe and the US

It seems to me that the "chattering classes" in Europe are basically anti-US anyway and anti-Bush particularly because they are convinced he's a moron with dangerous anti-socialist tendancies. A lot of Europe's intellectuals feel threatened by the US because it dispsroves all their theories about how the world should work. When you start from that point it is practically impossible to get to a point where you will do anything in support of the US. Even when it makes sense.

The politicians (particularly Chirac and Schröder) pander to the chattering classes bias so that they can get favourablely viewed by the talking heads on the TV, Radio and Newspapers.

As a result the average European has had nobody actually explain
a) why iraq is a threat
b) why the oil argument is about as strong as the Belgian army
c) why N Korea is treated differently
etc. instead we get idiotic diatribes by people like John Le Carré who don't aparently understand the phrase "logical reasoned argument".

Hence in general European people are "anti War". However when you talk to them and try a bit of logical reasoned argument then you can get them to change their minds. A quicker way would probably be either to have some sort of "smoking gun" found - which I reckon could happen this week - or for a terrorist to do something like hijack a plane at Frankfurt.

Of course the French government is being typicaly hypocritical here in that it is intervening unilaterally to defend our right to chocoloate from the Côte d'Ivroie. This intervention involves some 3000 troops from the Foreign Legion and it seems quite willing to kick some serious butt against anyone who disrupts what France wants to happen. There have been something like zero UN Securuty Council resolutions about the Ivory Coast, about as many requests for the French to intervene and even less consultation with allies.

DD [A brit, living in France and working in Germany]