Charles McCathieNevile

I had a holiday, with no connection at all to the internet. That happens rarely, in part because I am concerned about what happens when I do get connected again. But it is important to relax. (And to spend time with Miel when I can

).

And I got to add a new country

(Number 46. The Dominican Republic is the bigger of the two places I have been in the Caribbean)

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안녕하셔요

Monday, 13. March 2006, 20:06:02

web, swimming, travel, langues

Wow. That took a while. It means "hello" - annyong haseyo. In Korean. For the first time in my life, I am in Korea - the first new country I have visited in almost a year.

Arriving from Japan, where it was pretty warm for the last few days, I found the cool weather arriving in the evening refreshing. This morning I woke up early and went for a swim (97.9 km to go - I am still way behind). Without goggles my eyes turned bright red, but I went to breakfast anyway. I hope they thought I looked tired, because otherwise they might have assumed that I had managed to take a LOT of drugs and yet walk straight in. (Or maybe they are used to people who go swimming in the morning with no goggles).

I took a short video before I went swimming. When I was back the sun had come up and was shining over the scenery, but when I came back from breakfast it was snowing. Hooray for nice weather. (It will be nice to get back to Oslo, where this week seems to mostly vary between freezing and ten below - maybe I will get to go skating yet

).

I'm here for a conference on "Next Generation Web - Web 2.0 and Mobile". We are seeing a lot of talk about Web 2.0, and slowly the idea is taking hold. When the CEO of Yahoo! Korea stands up and says this is not about replacing the web, but about evolution, in terms of quality, it makes a lot more sense than when people stood up so long ago and said "we can replace the existing internet with [whatever their favourite buzz was], if only you all decide to buy product [something]...".

So, 48 hours to talk about Web 2.0, learn something about Korea, try to learn more words in Korean. One thing I have learned, because my phrase book repeats it a half-dozen times, is that you should end almost everything with -yo (요), to make it clear that you are being respectful. I have already learned how the alphabet works - characters as written are usually a combination of two or three basic characters, so there are only a moderate number to learn. Although I haven't got them all down yet, and I haven't learned the keyboard positions even for the handful I do recall.

Not enough time. And a third of it is already gone. But I hope to come back...

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Brrr, il fait froid

Saturday, 11. March 2006, 14:51:11

travel, w3c, working at opera, lang:fr ...

J'etais en France il y a une semaine, pour la "W3C Technical Plenary Meeting". C'est une des semaines les plus dures que je prevois chaque année. Mais c'est aussi un evènement que j'attends chaque deux ans (quand il se passe en France) avec impatience.

Comme toujours, c'etait interessant. Je bossait pas mal d'heures - plus que quand je travaillais pour W3C même, avec plus investi, parce que maintenant j'ai des responsibilités en plus, et c'est plus important comme opportunité de discuter avec des gens importants a ce que je cherche a faire.

Comme toujours je suis sorti la plupart des soirs, si non toujours trop tard, ni me suis-je couché assez tôt, en générale. Mais bon, les matins je me suis reveillé pour recommencer.

Comme toujours j'ai vu des amis, y compris ceux qui je n'ai pas assez vu recemment. Mais cette année j'avais en plus la chance de rencontrer quelques amis qui je n'ai pas vu depuis plusiers années, et qui m'ont manqué dans ces temps.

Et j'ai nagé. Pas beaucoup - je suis maintenant en troisième (de trois) chez Opera cette année, sans avoir vraiment fait assez. En plus, il faisait froid dans l'eau. Mais bon, c'est mieux ça que le fin de la semaine, quand je suis tombé un peu malade.

Merci à W3C pour l'evènement, à Koalie et tous qui ont aidé pour l'organiser. J'attends la prochaine...

(et merci Libby pour la photo)

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98,5 and peaceful?

Thursday, 26. January 2006, 07:01:27

australia, swimming

I said that it was hard to measure how far I swam in the sea. But then I turned my brain on, and realised I could swim up and down parallel to the beach, not just out to some mark.

The last couple of days I did just that. Not very far - 1km yesterday and half that this morning, before work. The sea is full of seaweed and sand (I hate sand as a rule) near the shore, so surfing isn't as fun as it might be. (I only body-surf - I have tried to ride a board once in my life, when I was ten. It went OK on tiny waves, but I never went back to it for no good reason).

Swimming in summer rain, while my towel is getting wet and sandy. It's not so harsh - afterwards I feel good. I am just waiting for the jetlag to wear off and stop waking me up early enough to enjoy it before I have to go to work. (I thought that would happen today, so I guess it counts as a bonus).

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Up and down. :|| And maybe...

Sunday, 27. November 2005, 15:13:02

travel, swimming, sports

(The last bit is an ascii-art representation of a musical repeat sign. I guess there is acutally the real thing in Unicode, but I couldn't find it yet (I was pretty lazy about searching for it, I admit).

North Carolina is far enough south that the weather is like a Melbourne autumn. It's sunny - not snowy like Montreal was when I flew over it. And where I am there is a wellness centre (what I grew up calling a 'gym'). Lots of treadmills for people who can't get enough of the rat-race and feel they want to spend some time running to nowhere. And bicycles that go nowhere. And skiing machines. Thre are masses of ways of doing things that people did for decades or millenia as transport, but now you don't move - you watch television and feel virtuous about the expensive machine that is helping you pretend you get out sometimes.

They also have a swimming pool. Apart from crossing the odd river, or other small waterway, swimming isn't really a means of getting somewhere else that is generally useful - since I don't live on islands or otherwise surounded by water. Maybe that's why I am happy swimming laps, while I get bored out of my brain running, let alone running on a treadmill.

The pool is 25 yards long. I never thought before what an inconvenient size that is, if you're swimming to some stupid target. Which I am - 50km by Christmas was the goal, and when I started on it it seemed pretty unikely. A few weeks later, it seemed positively ludicrous.

Yesterday I got into the 25 yard pool. As I puddled up and down, I started calculating what distances couldd be measured out in multiples of 25 yards. It turns out there are not many. If you take the approximation that 110 yards is 100 metres, then you cn do 22 laps for 500 meters. There aren't even fractions of a mile that make sense - you can do 1760 laps for 25 english miles, and I guess you can do 5 english miles, but that's a long way. And a lot of turning around. Norwegians have a metric mile, based on their old mile (which is like a country mile). It is 10km. So a fraction of that is easier. So far in my quest, I haven't accumulated one of them yet.

But I did manage to do 3200m - two english miles (and a margin for error). So I'm down to 42.6 left. If I swim today and tomorrow like that, the target suddenly seems possible. Now where's that widget for betting on me, Arve or the 50....

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Exercise for winter

Monday, 24. October 2005, 18:37:06

swimming, sports, life

Yesterday I went swimming, before the whole long lunch thing. Crawled out of bed too few hoours after I crawled in there, and got dressed. It was still snowing outside, still not staying on the ground, so I wandered through the cold to the pool. It takes me about half an hour to get there. It snowed while I was there I suppose, because it still was when I came out, although slowly giving way to sunshine.

This morning it was really cold. For the first time I thought maybe I should close my window at night now. Too hard to get out of bed. But this evening I went down again to the pool. I felt surprisingly good (after all the food yesterday), and I managed to swim 2100m in just under an hour - nowhere near a fast pace, but one I am happy with for now. If I stick to the swimming and manage my 50km by Christmas I would also hope to get to something more like 20 minutes for a kilometre - still only half the speed of a real swimmer, over a much shorter distance, but good enough for messing around.

Coming back to work the kitchen folks (Bless them!!) had left some Goulasj as late-night workers' food. It went down a treat. Probably even nicer than the view at sunset, on my way there, with the ski jump at holmenkollen, and something that looks from this distance like a lit-up church in front of it. (Or maybe it's a gaol? I have no idea.)

(PS For the curious, that means I have 45.8 km still to swim)

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